Lewes High-street now bears a very different appearance, in many ways, from its aspect of. say, 300 years ago. Picturesque gabled houses, mossy tiled roofs, small leaded paned windows and red tiled pavements made a quaint and interesting sight. Until 1879, the Cattle Market was held in the high street once a fortnight on Tuesdays, from St Andrew's Lane to St Nicholas' Lane. Sheep and pigs were on the south side in pens; cattle and horses (in the afternoon) on the north side. not tethered, but in charge of herds and grooms.

 

The scene of confusion may be imagined. Of course there was little or no wheeled traffic. The condition of the road surface was indescribable. Early next day after the market a gang of men with hosepipes and brooms would be hired to remove the refuse, casual labourers, who stood in the street at the top of what is now Station street, waiting for hire. Their language and habits made the pathway impossible: respectable citizens and their wives stayed at home on market days. The market was removed from the high street to a field in St John's, behind what is now St John's terrace, and later, in 1853, to its next home near the railway station.

 

The Christmas Fat Stock Show was then held in Albion street, before the market was removed. The Star inn, where is now the Town Hall, was a very ancient building, and in front of it, the ten Sussex martyrs were burnt alive in 1557. The vaulted cellars, in which they were confined for a time, are still in existence under the Town Hall. The finely carved old oak staircase in the Town Hall came from Slaugham Place, in Sussex, which was destroyed by fire. There is no record as to how and when it was removed.

 

The fine panelling in the Council Chamber and Mayor's Parlour came from the same place. Until quite lately descendants of the two women martyrs burned on that occasion still lived in Lewes, and I believe there are still some of their descendants there. The Market Tower was erected in 1793, and the old town bell, " Gabriel," which is only rung on national occasions - as for instance, when peace was proclaimed at the end of the Great War, and on the occasion of a banquet on the Dripping Pan in celebration of the Coronation of Queen Victoria - was taken from one of the old churches (probably St Mary-in-the-Market, which stood at the top of Station street). The bell weighs 18 cwt., and bears the head and armorial bearings of Henry VIII.

 

Lewes high street had many churches in its long length. Their names are often recorded by the names of the streets and lanes where they stood; St Nicholas', St Andrew's and St Martin's Lane, for instance, and very fine crypts, once part of these old churches, still exist under the steps and houses where once they stood. They must have been very small churches. The present church of St Michael is an amalgamation of St Andrew, St Mary-in-the-Market and St Michael. The external walls of this church were rebuilt in the worst period of the 18th century. Much of it is faced with Sussex knapped (or squared) flints, like the Grammar School and a few other houses in Lewes. Knapping required great skill, and is now a lost industry.

 

The ancient Town Hall of Lewes stood in a most inconvenient place, in the street at the top of Station street. It was eventually pulled down (early in 1800) as it had become a nuisance owing to its position in the middle of the roadway; and for some time the town authorities had no building of their own until about 1802, when the present County Hall was erected, and a clause was inserted in the special Act of Parliament obtained for the building giving the town authorities the right to use the County Hall for all town purposes at any time. During the several mayoralties of Alderman Holman this right was exercised on many occasions. The White Hart Hotel has at times been used as a Sessions House; until the present Town Hall was built comparatively recently, the business of the town of Lewes was carried on in these places pending the building of a home for the Corporation.

 

St Anne's Church was amalgamated with St Peter and St Mary West-out, i.e., outside the western boundary of the borough, in 1538. There was not a house beyond the church on the south side; it was open to the road. and menagerie shows and the circus used to be exhibited there. The borough boundary up to 1881 was from Irelands Lane to the Cliffe Bridge. A stone was hrown over the chancel end of St Anne's Church to mark the boundary. and the boys were "bumped " on the stone (still to be seen ) at Irelands Lane.

 

They were then given bread, cheese and beer at the Pelham Arms. This ceremony was called " Treading the Bounds." The Constables (the predecossors of the Lewes Corporation) then had to embark in a flat-bottomed boat near the Cement Works, and be rowed up the river under the Cliffe Bridge. There was then an aerial bridge connecting warehouses on either side of the river on which two or three men were stationed. with buckets of whitewash, soot, etc.. and the newly-elected governors of the town. had to run the gauntlet of this shower. They were afterwards honourably entertained at a banquet.

 

No trace of the origin of Irelands Lane can be found. It was in earlier days known as " Buke corn." Antioch street was supposed to have been a road connecting up with St James' Hospital, Southover. It was closed about 1595. Rotton Row is a corruption of Routine-row, the way for monks' processions to and from the Priory. The West Gate of the town stood near the Freemasons' Hall, in the cellars of which are some remains of the foundations of the old gate. In the house near, once occupied by Mr Watson, a wine merchant, is a considerable portion of one of the towers of this gate, and in the cellars may be seen the entrance to this tower, and the door and portions of window of a cottage adjoining, now all at least six feet below the present surface of the street.

 

Westgate street. was originally Cutler's Bars, then Westgate Lane, and afterwards White Lion Lane, from the sign of the public house near; the White Lion was the armorial bearing of Simon de Montfort. The West Gate was in a ruinous condition, in 1763, and was pulled down. it is said, for a wager or during a drunken frolic. Pipes Passage, approached by a flight of steps near the Freemasons' Hall. is so called because long clay pipes, known as " churchwardens," were made there in a workshop. Residents of Lewes once watched the process, and talked to the old man, named Tucknott. who made the pipes.

 

No. 163, High street, was occupied by a furniture dealer named Simmons (whose premises have been beautilully and poetically described by E. V. Lucas in one of his charming essays) had a passage way leading to the foot of the Castle Mound, skirting the old Castle walls and coming out in the valley under the house of the late Mrs Lucas. Mr Simmons erected a gate at the High-street entrance, and closed it at night. Some of the towns people resented this, and removed the gate. Mr Simmons brought an action for trespass at the assizes in November, 1877, and won his case because he had closed the door at nights for a certain period.

 

There is another of these public rights of way, leading from the High-street to the Castle Ditch, a charming corner of old-world Lewes, called Pope's Passage, from Pope, who had a chemist's shop adjoining more than a hundred and fifty years ago. We must hope that the same fate will not befall Pope's Passage. Watergate Lane recalls the time when Lewes was a port, and this gate was washed by the tide coming up over the Levels. Ships came right up to Lewes, and there was commerce with foreign countries direct to Lewes.

 

Up to 400 years ago Lewes was a port. The Lewes Bowling Green is one of the oldest in the kingdom, and was in existence about 1600. The famous Thomas Paine, author of the Rights of Man, which is said to have played an. important part in the foundation of the United States of America, often played on this ground, when he lived in the Bull House, Lewes, in 1768. This house was beautifully and carefully restored by a Mr Godfrey and was then a tearoom.

 

The Sussex Assizes were formerly a stately ceremonial. The Judge with his retinue drove to the Court in a great coach and pair with a gorgeous hammer cloth, with armorial bearings, coachman and footmen in plush and powder, and an escort of twenty javelin men, in Lincoln green coats with brass buttons, scarlet plush waist coats and knee breeches, white silk stockings, shoes with steel buckles and each carrying a formidable looking halberd.

 

The Judge was heralded by two scarlet coated trumpeters. This ceremony was shorn of this old-time splendour and then consisted of a motor car containing the Judge, preceded by two mounted military trumpeters. The halberds, studded with brass and metal medallions, and bearing names and dates, are, if I am not mistaken, carefully preserved in the present Town Hall.

 

Lewes Priory, a very fine Cluniac monastery, founded by William de Warrenne and his wife Gundrada. daughter of William the Conqueror, in 1070, was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537, who abolished the monks and destroyed the buildings, which, with their gardens and fish ponds, covered 40 acres. Until the early 1900's, the columbarium, or pigeon cote, stood. It was as large as a church, and had niches for 3,228 birds. The Priory acted as a hospital and schools for the surrounding country. Records show that the gentry living round often sent their cooks to be trained in the Abbot's kitchen; and in one old record that at least one lady of high degree bestowed all her wealth, when widowed, on the Priory, on condition, that she was given " a goodly house in Southenover, and bread from the Abbot's kitchen, and all food from the same source."

 

In 1845, when a cutting was being made for the Lewes and Brighton Railway through the Priory grounds, the workmen came upon several compartments, each about six feet square, such as might have supported the stone floors of the chapter house. Two of these adjoining each other were covered with slabs of Norman stone. On opening these, the first one there was found to contain a leaden casket guarding human bones. On the top end, legibly inscribed, was the word Gundrada.

 

A second coffin, rather larger, in the next compartment, was inscribed Willelm, who was buried in the chapter house of Lewes Priory in 1088. Gundrada died at Castleacre, in Norfolk, in 1085, and was brought to Lewes for interment. After a lapse of 767 years the remains of the founder and foundress of Lewes Priory in 1070 were discovered. It is thought that the disintegrated bones must have been collected and placed in these leaden caskets at some later period.

 

After the ruin of the Priory, it became a mass of tumbled stones, and people needing building materials freely helped themselves to anything they found useful among the ruins. A gentleman of the county riding there one day. Sir W. Shirley, of Isfield, noticed a slab of fine black marble, and had it conveyed to his house at Isfield. It was subsequently used for his own tombstone in Isfield Church, and was afterwards, during the restoration of the church, discovered to have a Latin inscription on its under side: on investigation it proved to be the slab which had covered the tomb of Gundrada. Through the exertions of its discoverer, Dr Clarke, of Buxted. in the year 1775. it was restored to its original state, and removed to the Parish Church of Southover.

 

Literal translation of inscription:

 

" Gundrada, the issue of a race of Dukes, the ornament of her age,
a noble scion, brought into the Churches of the English the balsams of her nature.
A Martha she was to the distressed: for piety a Mary.
Martha's part has gone its course, Mary's great part survives.
O pious Pancras, witness of her piety and Equity, you she makes her heir,
do you, meek man, Sustain your Mother.
That adverse morn, the 6th before the Calends of June (27th May) broke in pieces the sweet-scented alabaster Vessel of the Flesh."

 

A tradition of long descent has it that Harold of England, defeated at the Battle of Hastings, and sorely wounded by William the Conqueror's troops, was rescued from among the heaps of wounded and dead left on the field by his wife, " Editha of the Swan-neck," and subsequently, after many wanderings, became an anchorite, and ended his days as a holy anchorite in the church of St John-sub-Castro, Lewes. An anchorite's cell in the outer wall of the church was in good order up to the time of the rebuilding of the church in its present form. The inscription above the anchorite's cell was preserved, and was rebuilt into the new wall of the church - where the lettering can be seen today; but whether it is on the actual spot of the cell it is hard to ascertain.

 

During the course of building the track of the railway through the Priory grounds, a pit 60 feet deep was discovered full of human bones. It is impossible to say whether they were the remains of those killed during the Battle of Lewes, or of those who died of plague when there was a visitation, here at the time of the Great Plague in London. In any case, our thrifty forefathers utilised those bones as ballast for the new rail- way track from Lewes to Newhaven!

 

The old family house of the Gorings of Wiston is now the Unitarian Church here; the ancient door of entry to perhaps the back part of the house, is to be seen a few steps down Bull Lane. It has stone door-posts, worn away on both sides by being used as whet-stones for the weapons of the men-at-arms of those mediaeval times, who probably reached their quarters by that door, and sharpened their weapons on those ancient stones before going forth to fight their lords' battles - or perhaps to rob and harry rich farmers and citizens returning from market or town at dusk!

 

Country gentlemen and noblemen who lived on their country estates in the summer frequently had town nouses in Lewes for the winter months, which accounts for the numbers of beautiful and stately mansions to be seen in Lewes streets. The roads in those days were all but impassable in winter, and it was not an uncomnion sight, to see a splendid coach with its load of fine ladies and gallant gentlemen completely stuck in the mud, and finally released by a team of oxen from the farm harnessed to the coach and dragging it from its predicament.

 

There is mention of the fact that on the occasion of a special performance at the Lewes Theatre (which stood on the site of the Police Station) Lord and Lady Eardley came in their carriage from the " Shelleys " preceded by six running footmen dressed in white. Newcastle House was the town house in Lewes of the Dukes of Newcastle. The two fine early Georgian mansions on School Hill were no doubt the town houses of noble families in the county. The house now called Antioch House, once inhabited by the Misses Hillman. very well known in this parish, was evidently renovated, as to its front, early in the 19th or end of the 18th century.

 

Its back remained unchanged, and is a beautiful example of old building, with its charming gables and turrets, twisted chimneys, and picturesque windows leaking into the beautiful gardens. In this garden is a very fine old mulberry tree, said to have been grown from a slip brought to Rodmell by French Protestant silk weavers, who settled there on fleeing from Prance to escape the tyranny and fury of religious persecution some centuries ago. There are several other ancient mulberry trees in Lewes gardens, probably coming from the same source. One is at Pelham House, and one at Southover Grange.

 

As you may have ascertained from reading this short description of Lewes of Old, there is much to the town and this is but a glimpse into it's long, and sometimes murky past.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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