The proud and encroaching spirit with which he exercised his feudal rights in Sussex has been put on authentic record by the numerous complaints against him, embodied in the answers of the juries in each hundred[1] to King Edward the First's inquiries in 1274. Although the king's chief motive for thus probing the social wrongs inflicted on his subjects was probably the maintenance of the rights of the Crown, more than the repression of his nobles' excesses, yet by the stringent questions he put throughout his kingdom, much feudal oppression and some striking traits of the state of society were brought to light, of which some specimens from Sussex may be adduced. To the inquiry whether any new chase or free warren had been recently appropriated, the hundreds of Steyning, Poynings, and Fishersgate, &c. report that the Earl de Warenne had, without warrant, extended and established such over his whole barony of Lewes. Fishersgate adds, with respect to Portslade, that this had been going on "for twenty-two years, to the great damage of the country who used to enjoy the right."
Poynings states that the earl, for the sake of his hares and wild game (pro leporibus et feris suis), imprisoned and fined at will other persons who hunted, that he had seized the oxen of Richard Aguylun, at Edburton, for that cause, and confined his servants in Lewes Castle, where he asserted a right to imprison persons at his pleasure for a period of three days, and had refused entrance there to the king's writ commanding their delivery, acting with so much contempt of law that even the sheriff in person was afterwards with difficulty able to effect it. The hundreds of Brightford (Broadwater and four other parishes) and of Bottinghill (Hurstpierpoint, Worth, and ten other parishes) complain that the warrens of the earl are so full of game that they destroy nearly all the corn grown near them, which they nevertheless dare not protect by any hedge or fence for fear of imprisonment, and that neither knight or freeman dare hunt at all, to the inestimable damage of the country. The canons of South Mailing had been thus illegally ousted in the hundred of "Lokesfield" from their right of chase at Stanmere and Baldesden. The earl is charged also with claiming all wrecks on the coast without the liberty of redeeming the
- ↑ Rotuli Hundredorum.
