is 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."

CHAPTER XII

THE DOWNS

LEWES TO BRAMBER

Perhaps after all the most fundamental truth about Lewes is that she is
the capital of the South Downs, and the South Downs are the glory of
the South Country; from the noble antiquity of Winchester to the
splendour of Beachy Head they run like an indestructible line of Latin
verse beneath the blazon of England. They stand up between the land and
the sea, the most Roman thing in England, and of all English land it is
their white brows that the sun kisses first when it rises over the sea,
of all English hills every morning they are the first to be blest.

The most Roman thing in England I call them; and indeed this "noble
range of mountains" has not the obvious antiquity of the Welsh
mountains or the Mendip Hills, nor the tragic aspect as of something as
old as time, as old as the world itself, of the dark and sea-torn
cliffs of Cornwall, or the wild and desolate uplands of Somerset and
Devon. The South Downs seem indeed not so much a work of Nature as of
man; and of what men! In their regular and even line, in their
continuity and orderly embankment, in their splendid monotony of
contour they recall but one thing--Rome; they might be indeed only
another work of that mighty government which conceived and built the
great Wall that stretches from the Solway to the Firth of Forth which
marked the limit of the Empire and barred out its enemies. And this
wall of the South Downs, too, marked but