Page:Sussex Archaeological Collections, volume 6.djvu/322

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282 RECENT EXCAVATIONS AT PEVENSEY CASTLE.

renowned city of Anderida, except its time-honoured walls, — walls which have borne the storms of some sixteen hundred winters, besides the hostile attacks of the soldier and the pilferer, and which nothing but some convulsion of nature, or some intentional spoliation by human agency, can for ages yet to come destroy.


I ought to have mentioned a discovery made during the progress of our operations — namely, that the Roman walls have been in many parts heightened by a breastwork of subsequent date, probably Norman, so as to afford the defenders, while passing along the top of the wall a screen from the assailants without. This parapet is most observable between towers C and E, and upon tower L, out is everywhere almost concealed by that picturesque but destructive weed, the ivy.

In 4o King John, Hugh Dyve, lord of East Haddon, co. Northampton, claimed against Henry Dyve, his mesne tenant, the service of inclosing a certain hay upon the vallum of the king's castle of Pevensey in Sussex, being the alleged tenure pertaining to a knight's fee which he held of him in Brampton in the former county. What this hay or inclosure was I cannot conjecture. [Placit. 4 Joh.]

∵ The dotted line southward of tower G does not indicate a trench, but an inequality, probably resulting from a wall which anciently stood there.

Lewes, June 15, 1853.