Sussex

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

This article has not been researched and written yet

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.