ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE 



Of the establishments at Hastings and Warbleton the latter a trans- 

 ference from the older house practically nothing remains save the founda- 

 tions of the cruciform church at Warbleton. (For the plan see Suss. Arch. 

 Coll. xvi, 294.) 



The various orders of friars, who had houses in Chichester, Arundel, 

 Shoreham, Lewes, Rye, and Winchelsea, have left practically nothing in the 

 shape of buildings, save in the first and last named towns. At Chichester we 

 have the very perfect, stately, and lofty quire of the Franciscan church, which 

 has never been unroofed. The nave has been destroyed (probably as far back 

 as the fifteenth century), and the cloisters and other adjacent buildings 

 which there are grounds for believing to have been largely of timber 

 construction have likewise vanished. 



The ruins of the Franciscan church at Winchelsea, on a much smaller 

 scale, show features in common with the foregoing especially in the 

 peculiarly elegant chancel arch ; but its quire has a straight-sided apsidal 

 termination, and the tracery of the windows is more advanced. The date 

 can hardly be earlier than A.D. 1290. 



The Dominicans have no buildings remaining in Sussex, though they 

 once had settlements at Chichester, Arundel (established c. 1221), and 

 Winchelsea, but parts of the small house of the Carmelite order remain at 

 New Shoreham. 



The Augustinian friars had a small house at Rye, of which the parts 

 left show mid-fourteenth-century details, chiefly windows with tracery of 

 French or Flemish character. These occur in what was probably the chapel. 



Both the military orders the Knights Templars and the Hospitallers 

 had preceptories and commanderies in Sussex, the Templars at Shipley 

 and Sedlescombe (near Brighton), and the Hospitallers at Poling (near 

 Arundel) the last-named still retaining its chapel and other buildings, with 

 features of the late twelfth and early fifteenth centuries, which have never 

 been suffered to go to ruin, and retain their original roofs. Some of the 

 very remarkable features in the transeptal chapels of Sompting church 

 (in which parish the Hospitallers had an estate) and the fine twelfth-century 

 tower at Southwick may be traceable to their influence ; while Shipley church 

 owes its work of the same period to the Knights Templars. 



Nearly every trace of the nunneries at Lyminster, Ramestede, or Rams- 

 combe near Lewes, and Rusper has disappeared ; but considerable remains of 

 that at Easebourne, near Midhurst, founded about the middle of the 

 thirteenth century, still exist, forming a quadrangle together with the 

 parish church. 



Finally, we have to notice a large class of religious buildings in the 

 shape of hospitals such as the Maisons Dieu at Chichester and Arundel, the 

 leper and other hospitals at Rye, Playden, Seaford, New Shoreham, Lewes, 

 and Arundel. The first-named is of the highest importance architecturally. 



It must be borne in mind that, besides the foregoing monastic houses, 

 another group the foreign exercised a marked influence on the ecclesiastical 

 architecture of Sussex, from the reign of Edward the Confessor down to 

 about 1420, when Henry V seized the alien priories and confiscated their 

 estates. The abbeys and priories of Bayeux, Seez, Almanesches, Fecamp, 

 Bee, Grestein, St. Denis, and St. Florent, Saumur, &c. nearly all in 



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