so filthy stuff,” Layton writes to Wriothesley.  “I will not 20s. for all the hangings in this house....”  In August 1538 the place was granted to Sir Anthony Browne, who is said to have removed the cloak of the Conqueror and the famous Battle Abbey Roll to Cowdray.  This rascal razed the church and cloisters to the ground, and made the abbot’s lodging his dwelling.  It is said that one night as he was feasting a monk appeared before him and solemnly cursed him, prophesying that his family should perish by fire.  To the fulfilment of this curse Cowdray bears witness even to this day.

[Illustration:  BATTLE ABBEY]

What spoliation, time and neglect have left of the Abbey is beautiful, especially the great fourteenth century gateway which faces the Market Green.  Nothing save the foundations is left of the great church.  From the terrace, doubtless, we look across the battlefield, but all is so changed, the bleak hill-top has become a superb garden, that it is impossible to realise still less to reconstruct the battle, and indeed since we can only visit the place amid a crowd of tourists, our present discomfort makes any remembrance of the fight or of the great and solemn abbey which for so long turned that battlefield into a sanctuary impossible.

Nor indeed are we more fortunate in the parish church which was originally built by Abbot Ralph in the twelfth century.  It has been so tampered with and restored that little remains that is unspoilt.  There, and I think most fittingly, lies that Sir Anthony Browne who got Battle Abbey from the King who had stolen it.

Now when I had seen all this I went on my way, and because I was unhappy on account of all that theft and destruction, and because where once there had been altar and monks to serve it, now there was none, and because what had once been common to us all was now become the pleasure of one man, I went up out of Battle into the hills by the great road through the woods and so on and up by Dallington and Heathfield and so down and down and down all a summer day across the Weald till at evening I came to Lewes where I slept.  I remember nothing of that day but the wind and the hills and the great sun of May which went ever before me into the west so that I soon forgot to be sorry and rejoiced as I went.

CHAPTER XI

LEWES AND SIMON DE MONTFORT

I do not know of a more beautiful town than Lewes in all the wide south country; it is beautiful not only in itself but in its situation, set there upon an isolated hill over the Ouse and surrounded, as though they were great natural bastions set there in her defence, by Malling Hill on the north, Mount Caburn on the west, the broken heights of the Downs to the south, through which the Ouse flows towards Newhaven and the sea, and on the east by Mount Harry under which was fought the very famous battle of Lewes in which Simon de Montfort took his king prisoner.