As one Lieutenant Hammond noted in 1635, Chichester was a ‘sweet little city’, standing ‘in a pleasant fertile level’. Restricted Grandeur ed. T.J. Maclean (1974), 6. A walled city of Roman origins, it lay on the far western edge of Sussex, on a coastal plain below the Downs, only a few miles from the Hampshire border, and some seven miles from the sea. R.
In the seventeenth century Lewes was one of the most populous towns in Sussex. Situated six miles from the coast on the river Ouse, between the Weald and the South Downs, it was important both as a port and a centre of civil and ecclesiastical administration. Like Chichester, another venue for the quarter sessions, Lewes was a social centre for the county’s gentry; many of the most prominent had houses there. VCH Suss. vii. 1-31; J. Goring, ‘The fellowship of the Twelve in Elizabethan Lewes’, Suss. Arch. Coll. cxix.
In the sixteenth century Rye, situated at the end of a tidal bay formed by the estuaries of the rivers Brede, Tillingham and Rother, and on a promontory on the edge of Romney Marsh, was the wealthiest Sussex town. By the 1570s it was the most important port on the south coast, and among the ten most important in the country, approximately as busy as Bristol. Its trade, dominated by the fishing industry, was undertaken with many European trading centres, especially those along the Channel.
Situated on the River Rother in north-west Sussex, some six miles west of Petworth, the seat of the Percys, earls of Northumberland, Midhurst was a borough by prescription, which had first returned Members in 1301, and which traditionally fell under the influence of the Brownes, Viscounts Montagu of Cowdray, the county’s most prominent Catholic dynasty. The family’s steward nominated the borough’s jury at the annual meeting of the capital court baron, which in turn elected the bailiffs, the senior of whom acted as returning officer.
Winchelsea, one of the ancient towns added to the Cinque Ports, had been prominent in the middle ages as a Templar centre and its port was initially more important than its near neighbour, Rye. It obtained a charter in 1191. On the east side of an estuary at the mouth of the rivers Rother, Brede and Tillingham, it was destroyed by the sea in thirteenth century, but then rebuilt on a new site in the nearby parish of Icklesham. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, it was a ‘decayed’ port, with diminished trade and population.
In the seventeenth century Horsham, located on the river Arun and on the edge of St Leonard’s Forest, was one of the wealthiest and most prominent Sussex towns; as a centre of the Wealden iron industry, and as the nearest to London, it attracted merchants from the capital to its market. Its accessibility led to its becoming one of the main administrative centres in the county, providing a venue for both assizes and quarter sessions, as well as the home of the county gaol. D.E. Hurst, Hist. and Antiquities of Horsham (1889), 27, 158-65; VCH Suss. vi, pt. 2, pp.
Hastings, in the Bourne valley on the east Sussex coast, was one of the original Cinque Ports, and a centre for fishing and for the transport of commodities related to the iron industry, as well as a focal point of the county’s sea defences. The town’s status as a port had been declining since the middle ages, however, as Rye and Winchelsea increased in importance, and much of the commerce with which Hastings was involved appears to have been coastal. The harbour had decayed significantly by the mid-sixteenth century, attempts to raise money for repairs having proved fruitless.
Bramber lay four miles from the sea on the west bank of the River Adur, and on the edge of a tidal marsh. A Norman settlement, it was overshadowed by two neighbouring boroughs, Steyning, a mile to the north west, and Shoreham, four miles to the south east. The town’s castle had ceased to be occupied by the early sixteenth century; its role as a port was undermined by both its inaccessibility and the rise of Shoreham, such that only local barge trade remained; and the market had lapsed by 1600. VCH Suss. vi, pt.
Situated where the South Downs met the Sussex Weald, west of the River Adur, Steyning was one of the county’s many declining ports, overshadowed by New Shoreham, a few miles downstream at the mouth of the river. By the seventeenth century its economy relied on its role as a market town for the area’s arable produce. VCH Suss. vi(i). 220, 232-4. The population may be gauged from the 203 adult males who took the Protestation in 1642 and the recording of 290 conformists and ten non-conformists in the 1676 Compton census. West Suss.
Arundel’s importance lay in its advantageous defensive position on the edge of the South Downs, at the lowest crossing point of the wide tidal estuary of the Arun. Although a market town and, joined with Chichester, a port of some importance for the timber trade, it was, as William Camden recognised, ‘greater in fame than in fact’. The borough was always dominated by its castle, and as a consequence, by the Howards, earls of Arundel, who held the honour of Arundel, of which the castle, manor and borough were part. VCH Suss. v, pt. 1, 11-13, 63-6; Tierney, Hist. and Antiq.