found a Cluniac Priory at the gates of their town of Lewes.  They therefore approached the Abbot with the request that he would send three or four of his monks to start the monastery.  They did not find him very willing; for the essence of Cluny was discipline, the discipline of an army, and doubtless the Abbot feared that, so far away as Sussex seemed, his monks would be out of his reach and might become but as other men.  But at last the Conqueror himself joined his prayers to those of William de Warenne, and in 1076 the Abbot of Cluny sent the monk Lanzo and three other brethren to England, and to them William de Warenne gave the little church of St Pancras especially rebuilt for their use with the land about it, called the Island, and other lands sufficient to support twelve monks.  But the Abbot of Cluny had no sooner agreed to establish his congregation in England than he seems to have repented.  At any rate he recalled Prior Lanzo and kept him so long that William de Warenne, growing impatient, seriously thought of transferring his foundation to the Benedictines; but at length Prior Lanzo returned and all was arranged as was at first intended.  The monastery flourished apace and grew not only in wealth but in piety.  Prior Lanzo proved an excellent ruler, and the Priory of St Pancras at Lewes became famous for its sanctity through all England.

To the same William de Warenne Lewes owes the foundation or the refoundation of its Castle the second centre about which the town grew.

A glance at the map will assure us that Lewes could not but be a place of great importance, increasing with England in wealth and strength.  The South Downs stand like a vast rampart back from the sea, guarding South England from surprise and invasion.  But this great wall is broken at four different places, at Arundel in the west where the Arun breaks through the chalk to find the sea, at Bramber where the Adur passes seaward, at Lewes where the Ouse goes through, and at Wilmington where the Cuckmere winds through the hills to its haven.  Each of these gaps was held and guarded by a castle while the level eastward of Beachy Head was held by Pevensey.  Of these castles I suppose the most important to have been Lewes, for it not only held the gap of the Ouse but the pass by Falmer and in some sort the Cuckmere Valley also.

[Illustration:  LEWES CASTLE]

But the great day of Lewes Castle was that of Simon de Montfort—­I shall deal with that later.  Here it will be enough to point out that only a fragment of the great building with its double keep, whose ruin we see to-day, dates from the time of the first De Warenne, the rest being a later work largely of Edward I’s. time.

Let me now return to the Priory which, in the development of the town, played a part at least as great as that of the Castle.