int shadows are beginning to lengthen, expecting little. In
fact, if the traveller be acceptable, capable of appreciating anything
so still and exquisite, Winchelsea will appear to him to be, as it is
one of the loveliest things left to us in England, place, as Coventry
Patmore so well said, in a trance, La Belle an Bois dormant. Nowhere
else in England certainly have I found just that exquisite stillness,
that air of enchantment, as of something not real, something in a
picture or a poem, inexplicable and inexpressible. How spacious it is,
and how quiet, full of the sweetness and the beauty of some motet by
Byrd. History is little to us in such a place, which is to be enjoyed
for its own sake, for its own unique beauty and delight. And yet the
history of Winchelsea is almost as unique as is the place itself.

Winchelsea when we first hear of it as given by King Edward Confessor
to the monks of Fecamp, was not set upon this hill-top as we see it
to-day, but upon an island, low and flat, now submerged some three
miles south and east of the present town. Here William the Conqueror
landed upon his return from Normandy when he set out to take Exeter
and subdue the West; here again two of those knights who murdered St
Thomas landed in their pride, hot from the court of Henry their
master. Like Rye, its sister, to whom it looked across the sea,
Winchelsea was added to the Cinque Ports and was presently taken from
the monks of Fecamp by Henry III. It was now its disasters began.
In 1236 it was inundated by the sea as again in 1250, when
it was half destroyed. Eagerly upon the side of Montfort it
was taken after Evesham by Prince Edward, and its inhabitants
slain, so that when in 1288 it was again drowned by the sea
it was decided to refound the town upon the hill above, then in
the possession of Battle Abbey, which the King purchased for this
purpose. At that time the hill upon which Winchelsea was built, and
still stands, was washed by the sea, and the harbour soon became of
very great importance, indeed until the sixteenth century, when the
sea began to retire, Winchelsea was of much greater importance than
Rye. The retreat of the sea, however, completely ruined it, for it was
served by no river as Rye was by the Rother.

The town of Edward I., as we may see to-day, by what time has left us
of it, was built in squares, a truly Latin arrangement, the streets
all remaining at right angles the one to the other. It had three ga