LEWES AND SIMON DE MONTFORT
I do not know of a more beautiful town than Lewes in all the wide
south country; it is beautiful not only in itself but in its
situation, set there upon an isolated hill over the Ouse and
surrounded, as though they were great natural bastions set there in
her defence, by Malling Hill on the north, Mount Caburn on the west,
the broken heights of the Downs to the south, through which the Ouse
flows towards Newhaven and the sea, and on the east by Mount Harry
under which was fought the very famous battle of Lewes in which Simon
de Montfort took his king prisoner.
The natural strength and beauty of this situation has been much
increased by the labour of man, for Lewes is set as it were all in a
garden out of which it rises, a pinnacle of old houses crowned by the
castle upon its half precipitous hill. It is a curiously un-English
vision you get from the High Street for instance, looking back upon
the hill or from the little borgo of Southover or from Cliffe, and yet
there can be few more solidly English places than Lewes.
That the Romans had here some sort of settlement there can be no
doubt, that Lewes was a place of habitation in the time of the Saxons
is certain, indeed in Athelstan's day it boasted of two mints, but the
town, as it appears to us in history, grew up about the Cluniac
Priory of St Pancras under the protection of the Castle, and to these
it owes everything except its genesis.
Whatever Lewes may have been before the Conquest that revolution saw
it pass into the power of one of the greatest of William's nobles,
that William de Warenne who was his son-in-law. It was he and his wife
Gundrada, generally supposed to be the Conqueror's daughter, who
founded the Priory of St Pancras at Southover. It is probable, even
certain, that a chapel, possibly with some sort of religious house
attached to it, existed here before William de Warenne obtained from
the Conqueror the rape and town of Lewes. In any case it can have
been of small importance. But within ten years of the Conquest William
de Warenne and his wife determined to found an important monastery at
the gates of their town, and with this intention they set out on
pilgrimage for Rome to consult, and to obtain the blessing of, the
Pope. They got so far as Burgundy when they found that it was
impossible to go on in safety on account of the war between the Pope
and the Emperor. When they found themselves in this predicament they
were not far from the great Abbey of SS. Peter and Paul at Cluny.
Now the Cluniac Congregation, the first great reform of the
Benedictine Order, had been founded there in the diocese of Macon in
910, and it was then at the height of its power and greatness. Cluny
was the most completely feudal of the orders, for the Cluniac monks
were governed by Priors each and all of whom were answerable only to
the Abbot of Cluny himself, while every monk in the Order had to be
professed by him, that mighty ecclesiastic at this time can have been
master of not less than two thousand monks. Cluny's boast was its
school and the splendour of its ceremonies and services; God was
served with a marvellous dignity and luxury undreamed of before, and
unequalled since Cluny declined. It was to this mother house of the
greatest Congregation of the time that William de Warenne turned with
his wife when war prevented them on the road to Rome, and we cannot
wonder that they were so caught by all they saw that they determined
to put the monastery they proposed to build under the Abbot of Cluny
and to found a Cluniac Priory at the gates of their town of Lewes.
They therefore approached the Abbot with the request that he would
send three or four of his monks to start the monastery. They did not
find him very willing; for the essence of Cluny was discipline, the
discipline of an army, and doubtless the Abbot feared that, so far
away as Sussex seemed, his monks would be out of his reach and might
become but as other men. But at last the Conqueror himself joined his
prayers to those of William de Warenne, and in 1076 the Abbot of Cluny
sent the monk Lanzo and three other brethren to England, and to them
William de Warenne gave the little church of St Pancras especially
rebuilt for their use with the land about it, called the
Island, and other lands sufficient to support twelve monks. But the
Abbot of Cluny had no sooner agreed to establish his congregation in
England than he seems to have repented. At any rate he recalled Prior
Lanzo and kept him so long that William de Warenne, growing impatient,
seriously thought of transferring his foundation to the Benedictines;
but at length Prior Lanzo returned and all was arranged as was at
first intended. The monastery flourished apace and grew not only in
wealth but in piety. Prior Lanzo proved an excellent ruler, and the
Priory of St Pancras at Lewes became famous for its sanctity through
all England.
To the same William de Warenne Lewes owes the foundation or the
refoundation of its Castle the second centre about which the town
grew.
A glance at the map will assure us that Lewes could not but be a place
of great importance, increasing with England in wealth and strength.
The South Downs stand like a vast rampart back from the sea, guarding
South England from surprise and invasion. But this great wall is
broken at four different places, at Arundel in the west where the Arun
breaks through the chalk to find the sea, at Bramber where the Adur
passes seaward, at Lewes where the Ouse goes through, and at
Wilmington where the Cuckmere winds through the hills to its haven.
Each of these gaps was held and guarded by a castle while the level
eastward of Beachy Head was held by Pevensey. Of these castles I
suppose the most important to have been Lewes, for it not only held
the gap of the Ouse but the pass by Falmer and in some sort the
Cuckmere Valley also.
[Illustration: LEWES CASTLE]
But the great day of Lewes Castle was that of Simon de Montfort--I
shall deal with that later. Here it will be enough to point out that
only a fragment of the great building with its double keep, whose ruin
we see to-day, dates from the time of the first De Warenne, the rest
being a later work largely of Edward I's. time.
Let me now return to the Priory which, in the development of the town,
played a part at least as great as that of the Castle.
The Priory had always been famous for its piety, and in 1199, Hugh,
who had been Prior there till 1186, was raised to be Abbot of Cluny
itself. This is interesting and important for we have thus an ex-Prior
of Lewes as Abbot of Cluny during the great dispute between the Order
and the Earl of Warenne. In 1200 Lewes was without a Prior, and Abbot
Hugh appointed one Alexander. For some reason or other De Warenne
refused to accept him and even went so far as to claim that the
appointment lay with him, an impossible pretension. Yet even within
the Priory he is said to have won support, certain of the monks
claiming that, save for a tribute of one hundred shillings a year to
Cluny, they were independent. The Pope was appealed to and he of
course gave a clear decision, not in the English way of compromise,
which is the way of a barbarian and a coward, but like an honest man
deciding 'twixt right and wrong. His judgment was wholly in favour of
the Abbot of Cluny. The Earl then began to bluster and to attempt to
appeal beyond the Pope; he even dared to place armed men at the Priory
gate and to stop all communications with Cluny. The Abbot replied by
an interdict upon Lewes, and things were in this confusion when the
Pope appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of
Chichester and Ely to hear what De Warenne had to say in excuse for his
violence. The Abbot of Cluny himself came over and was insulted in
Lewes by De Warenne's men. In appointing English judges to hear the
case the Pope must have known that all would end in a compromise. At
any rate this is what happened, and it was decided that in future, when
a vacancy occurred, the Abbot of Cluny should nominate two candidates
of whom De Warenne should choose one for Prior. This ridiculous
judgment decided nothing. Of two things, one; either the Abbot was
right or he was wrong. If he were right why should he forego his claim,
to satisfy De Warenne who was wrong? A decision was what was needed. In
1229 the Pope rightly declared the compromise null and void, and the
Abbot of Cluny regained his rights. At once the moral condition of the
house improved, and when it was visited in 1262 everything was reported
to be satisfactory, and unlike any other Cluniac house in England this
of Lewes was not in debt.
The turning point in the history of the Priory would seem to have been
the one great moment in the story of the town; the appalling affair in
which it was involved by Simon de Montfort in 1264 when he took the
town, then Henry III.'s headquarters, and captured the King and young
Prince Edward. It would seem that De Montfort's soldiers had very
little respect for holy places, for we read that not only were the
altars defiled but the very church was fired and hardly saved from
destruction.
The quarrel between the King and his barons would seem, too, to have
involved the monks, for we find the sub-prior and nine brethren were
expelled from Lewes for conspiracy and faction and went to do penance
in various houses of the Congregation. Indeed such was the general
collapse here that before the end of the century the Priory was
practically bankrupt.
That Lewes suffered severely from the Black Death of 1348-49 is
certain, but we know very little about it, and indeed the history of
the house is negligible until, in the beginning of the fifteenth
century the whole system of Cluny was called in question and it was
claimed on behalf of Lewes that it should be raised to an abbacy with
the power to profess monks. It will be remembered that the Abbot of
Cluny--the only Abbot within the Congregation--alone could profess, and
in times of war, such as the fourteenth century, this must have been
very inconvenient. Indeed we read of men who had been monks their whole
life long, but had never been professed at all. It is therefore not
surprising that such a claim should at last have been put forward. It
is equally not surprising that such a claim was not allowed. The Abbot
of Cluny refused to raise Lewes to the rank of an abbey, but he granted
the Prior the privilege of professing his monks; this in 1410. So
things continued till in 1535, the infamous Layton was sent by Thomas
Cromwell to inquire into the state of the Priory of Lewes, to nose out
any scandal he could and to invent what he could not find. His methods
as applied to Lewes are notorious for their insolence and brutality. He
professes to have found the place full of corruption and rank with
treason. And in this he was wise, for his master Cromwell wanted the
house for himself. Upon November 16, 1537, the Priory of St Pancras at
Lewes was surrendered. It was then served by a Prior and twenty-three
monks and eighty servi; and it and its lands were granted by the
King to Thomas Cromwell.
Such was the end of the most famous Cluniac house in England, the
sanctuary founded by that De Warenne who had built up Lewes between
his Castle on the height and his monastery in the vale. Almost nothing
remains to-day of that great and splendid building, but in 1845, in
building the railway, the coffins of the founders De Warenne and his
wife Gundrada were found. These now lie in St John's Church, here in
Southover close by, which belonged to the Priory. It was originally a
plain Norman building of which the nave remains, the rest of the
church as we see it, being for the most part either Perpendicular or
altogether modern.
Of course the Priory of St Pancras was not alone in the fate that
befell it at the hands of the Tudor in 1537. The only other religious
house in Lewes suffered a like fate. This was the convent of the
Franciscans, dedicated, as most authorities agree, in honour of Our
Lady and St Margaret. The Friars Minor were established in Lewes
before 1249, and their convent was one of the last to be surrendered,
in 1538.
From St John's Church, the visitor, not without a glance at the old
half timber house close by said to have been the residence of Anne of
Cleves, will pass up to the High Street where, under the Castle,
stands the parish church of St Michael, the only ancient part of which
is the round Norman tower, a rare thing. A fourteenth century brass to
one of the De Warennes is to be seen within. Further west is the
Transitional Norman church of St Anne, with curious capitals on the
south side of the nave. Here is a fine basket-work Norman font, and
in the south aisle at the east end a vaulted chapel. To the north of
the chancel is a recessed tomb.
But it is not in the churches we have in Lewes that we shall to-day
find the symbol, as it were, of that old town, still so fair a thing,
which held the passage of the Ouse through the Downs and in the
thirteenth century witnessed the great battle in which Simon de
Montfort, mystic and soldier, defeated and took captive his king. For
that we must go to the Castle ruin that crowns Lewes as with a
battlement.
The Castle is reached from the High Street near St Michael's church by
the Castlegate. It was founded, as I have said, by the first De
Warenne, but the gate-house by which we enter is later, dating from
King Edward's time, the original Norman gate being within. The Castle
had two keeps, a rare feature. Only one of these remains, reached by a
winding steep way, and of this only two of the fine octagonal towers
are left to us. These two are thirteenth century works. From the
principal tower, now used as a museum, we may get the best view of the
famous battlefield under Mount Harry, one of the most famous sites of
the thirteenth century in England, for the battle that was fought
there seemed to have decided everything; in fact it decided nothing,
for its result was entirely reversed at Evesham by the military genius
of Prince Edward.
The cause contested upon these noble hills to the north-west of Lewes
is one which continually recurs all through English history; the cause
of the Aristocracy against the Crown. The monarchies of western
Europe, which slowly emerged from the anarchy of the Dark Ages and
helped to make the Middle Age the glorious and noble thing it was,
are, if we consider them spiritually at least, democratic weapons, or
rather, politically, they seem to sum up the national energy and to
express it. In them was vested, and this as of divine right, the
executive. Without the Crown nothing could be done, no writ issued, no
fortress garrisoned. In the Crown was gathered all the national ends,
it was a symbol at once of unity and of power. Against this glorious
thing in England we see a constant and unremitting rebellion on the
part of the aristocracy. It was so in the time of King John when the
rascal barons curbed and broke the central government; it was so in
the time of Henry III. when Simon de Montfort led, and for a time
successfully, the rebellion. It has been so always and not least in
the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century so falsely represented
as a democratic movement, when the parvenu aristocracy founded upon
the lands and wealth of the raped Church in the sixteenth century,
broke the Crown up and finally established in England a puppet king, a
mere Venetian Doge incapable, as we have seen in the last few years,
of defending the people against an unscrupulous and treasonous
plutocracy led by a lawyer as certainly on the make as Thomas
Cromwell. The infamous works of such men as these have most often been
done under the hypocritical and lying banner of the rights of the
people as though to gain his ends the devil should bear the cross of
Christ. It is so to-day; it was so in the time of Simon de Montfort.
I have said that the King was the fountain of all power in the England
of Simon; it was therefore his supreme object to get possession of the
King's body that he might have control of the executive machinery of
the country and thus in fact be king _de facto_. It was this which he
achieved upon the battlefield of Lewes in 1264.
For some ten years before that battle the Barons of England had been
restless under the yoke of the central government, the Crown, which
stood not for them but for us all. They had already wrung from Henry
III. under compulsion, when he was within their power and not a free
agent, certain concessions which now he refused to confirm to them.
They called him liar and covered him with the same abuse that their
successors hurled at Charles I.; but Henry stood firm, he refused
what had been dragged from him by force, and Simon de Montfort, Earl
of Leicester, raised an army not from the people but from his own
feudal adherents and his friends and took the field, striking into the
valley of the Severn, where he seized Hereford, Gloucester, Worcester
and Bridgnorth with their castles. Then he marched straight upon
London where, among the Guilds, he had many adherents and friends. War
seemed inevitable, but, as it happened, a truce was called, and the
question which Simon had made an excuse for his rising, the question
of the King's refusal to confirm the grant of privileges wrung from
him by force, was submitted for decision to St Louis of France,
undoubtedly the most reverent, famous, and splendid figure of that
day. St Louis, unlike an Englishman, decided not with a view to peace
as though justice were nothing and right an old wives' tale, but
according to law and his conscience, honestly and cleanly before God
like an intelligent being. Of two things one, either the King was
right or he was wrong. St Louis decided that the King was right, and
this upon January 23rd, 1264.
Simon refused to abide by the decision. This man in his own conception
was above law and honour and justice, he was the inspired and
privileged servant of God. In this hallucination he deceived himself
even as Oliver Cromwell did later and equally for his own ends. He,
too, would break the Crown and himself govern England. He, too, was
brutal beyond bearing, proud and insolent with his inferiors,
imperious even to God, a great man, but one impossible to suffer in
any state which is to endure, a dangerous tyrant.
This great mystical soldier at once took the field, and when Henry
returned from Amiens, where the court of St Louis had sat, he found
all England up, the Cinque Ports all hot for Simon, London ponderous
in his support, and in all south-eastern England but one principle
fortress still in loyal hands, that of Rochester.
North and west of London, however, things were less disastrous, and
Henry's first move was to secure all this and to cut off London, the
approach to which he held on the south-east in spite of everything,
since he commanded Rochester, from the Midlands and the West. Simon's
answer was the right one; he struck at Rochester and laid siege to it.
Down upon him came King Henry to relieve it and was successful. Simon
swept back upon London, there he gathered innumerable levies and
again advanced into the south against the King.
Henry having relieved Rochester, marched also into the south,
doubtless intent upon the reduction of the Cinque ports; for this,
however, Simon gave him no time. He came thundering down, half London
weltering behind him, across the Weald, and Henry, wheeling to meet
him, came upon the 12th of May up the vale of Glynde and occupied
Lewes. On the following day Simon appeared at Fletching in the vale of
the Weald, some nine miles north of Lewes; there he encamped. Very
early in the morning of the 14th May, Simon arrayed his troops and
began his march southward upon the royal army. Dawn was just breaking
when his first troopers came over the high Down and saw Lewes in the
morning mist, the royal banners floating from the Castle--all still
asleep. Slowly and at his ease Simon ordered his men. Upon the north,
conspicuously, he set his litter with his standard above it and about
it massed the raw levies of London. Upon the south he gathered the
knights and men-at-arms led by the young Earl of Gloucester. As for
himself he remained with the reserve. Then when all was ready he gave
the order and both wings, north and south, began to advance upon the
town "hoping to find their enemies still abed."
Simon's plan was a simple one, he hoped to surprise his foes and he
intended in any case to throw his main strength southward upon the
Priory of St Pancras, while pretending that his main attack was to be
upon the Castle. He did not altogether succeed in surprising his
foes, but in everything else he was successful. The royalists were
aware of his approach only at the last moment, so that when they
poured out of the Castle and Priory and town they were in some
confusion. Then Prince Edward, observing the standard of Simon over
the litter, flung himself upon the Londoners, who broke and fled while
he pursued them, nor did he stay his hand till he was far away from
Lewes. He returned at last victorious and triumphant to find Simon's
banner floating from Lewes Castle, the King of the Romans and the King
of England in Simon's hands and the day lost. Weary though he was, he
attempted with all the impetuosity of youth to reverse that verdict.
Through the streets of Lewes he fought, till at length he was forced
to take refuge in the church of the Franciscans, where indeed Simon
found him.
Such was the battle of Lewes, which gave all England to De Montfort for
more than a year; till indeed Lewes was reversed, by Prince Edward who,
escaping from his hands at Hereford, gathered a new army about him and
forced Simon to meet him upon the field of Evesham where, when the
great soldier-mystic saw the royal banners upon the dawn, he cried out
that last great word of his, "The Lord have mercy on our souls for our
bodies are Prince Edward's": to be answered when he demanded mercy,
"there is no treating with traitors."