New book claims Saxon origins for Cliffe church

“The Domesday Book audit in 1086 recorded 59 houses in Cliffe”, says author Peter Varlow, “and 20 of them were uninhabited, perhaps from the attentions of William the Conqueror in 1066 before he led his troops across the river to the fortress-burh of Lewes itself.

“So Cliffe was a sizeable Saxon community before he arrived. The Archbishop of Canterbury had a palace less than a mile down the road at South Malling, next door to a long-established college of canons, and it seems very likely its priests wouldn’t have neglected to established at least a chapel here – some time before the Norman foundation of the church that is commonly cited.”

The Conqueror’s Domesday audit in 1086 recorded that William de Warenne, lord of Lewes Rape, also held these 59 houses in Pevensey Rape. (The two rapes, separated by the Ouse, were parts of the five north-south slices of Sussex held for the Conqueror by five of his lords.) The settlement is identified by Lewes historian Colin Brent as being Cliffe.

On the Domesday evidence, by the millennium it was likely to have been already a thriving community founded on commerce more than on agriculture. East-west travellers were using a ford over the river, or perhaps an early bridge, and the navigable river was an artery of trade in domestic and imported goods shipped at its wharves for deliveries in and out of Lewes and its hinterland. Lewes was one of six late-Saxon Sussex ports.

Peter’s new book, The History of the Fabric and Furnishings of St Thomas à Becket Church, is on sale in the church and online via www.st-thomas-lewes.org.uk/history-in-brief