But it is not in the churches we have in Lewes that we shall to-day find the symbol, as it were, of that old town, still so fair a thing, which held the passage of the Ouse through the Downs and in the thirteenth century witnessed the great battle in which Simon de Montfort, mystic and soldier, defeated and took captive his king.  For that we must go to the Castle ruin that crowns Lewes as with a battlement.

The Castle is reached from the High Street near St Michael’s church by the Castlegate.  It was founded, as I have said, by the first De Warenne, but the gate-house by which we enter is later, dating from King Edward’s time, the original Norman gate being within.  The Castle had two keeps, a rare feature.  Only one of these remains, reached by a winding steep way, and of this only two of the fine octagonal towers are left to us.  These two are thirteenth century works.  From the principal tower, now used as a museum, we may get the best view of the famous battlefield under Mount Harry, one of the most famous sites of the thirteenth century in England, for the battle that was fought there seemed to have decided everything; in fact it decided nothing, for its result was entirely reversed at Evesham by the military genius of Prince Edward.

The cause contested upon these noble hills to the north-west of Lewes is one which continually recurs all through English history; the cause of the Aristocracy against the Crown.  The monarchies of western Europe, which slowly emerged from the anarchy of the Dark Ages and helped to make the Middle Age the glorious and noble thing it was, are, if we consider them spiritually at least, democratic weapons, or rather, politically, they seem to sum up the national energy and to express it.  In them was vested, and this as of divine right, the executive.  Without the Crown nothing could be done, no writ issued, no fortress garrisoned.  In the Crown was gathered all the national ends, it was a symbol at once of unity and of power.  Against this glorious thing in England we see a constant and unremitting rebellion on the part of the aristocracy.  It was so in the time of King John when the rascal barons curbed and broke the central government; it was so in the time of Henry III. when Simon de Montfort led, and for a time successfully, the rebellion.  It has been so always and not least in the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century so falsely represented as a democratic movement, when the parvenu aristocracy founded upon the lands and wealth of the raped Church in the sixteenth century, broke the Crown up and finally established in England a puppet king, a mere Venetian Doge incapable, as we have seen in the last few years, of defending the people against an unscrupulous and treasonous plutocracy led by a lawyer as certainly on the make as Thomas Cromwell.  The infamous works of such men as these have most often been done under the hypocritical and lying banner of the rights of the people as though to gain his ends the devil should bear the cross of Christ.  It is so to-day; it was so in the time of Simon de Montfort.