ry
impossible.

Nor indeed are we more fortunate in the parish church which was
originally built by Abbot Ralph in the twelfth century. It has been so
tampered with and restored that little remains that is unspoilt. There,
and I think most fittingly, lies that Sir Anthony Browne who got Battle
Abbey from the King who had stolen it.

Now when I had seen all this I went on my way, and because I was
unhappy on account of all that theft and destruction, and because where
once there had been altar and monks to serve it, now there was none,
and because what had once been common to us all was now become the
pleasure of one man, I went up out of Battle into the hills by the
great road through the woods and so on and up by Dallington and
Heathfield and so down and down and down all a summer day across the
Weald till at evening I came to Lewes where I slept. I remember
nothing of that day but the wind and the hills and the great sun of
May which went ever before me into the west so that I soon forgot to
be sorry and rejoiced as I went.

CHAPTER XI

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