the town; the appalling affair in
which it was involved by Simon de Montfort in 1264 when he took the
town, then Henry III.'s headquarters, and captured the King and young
Prince Edward. It would seem that De Montfort's soldiers had very
little respect for holy places, for we read that not only were the
altars defiled but the very church was fired and hardly saved from
destruction.

The quarrel between the King and his barons would seem, too, to have
involved the monks, for we find the sub-prior and nine brethren were
expelled from Lewes for conspiracy and faction and went to do penance
in various houses of the Congregation. Indeed such was the general
collapse here that before the end of the century the Priory was
practically bankrupt.

That Lewes suffered severely from the Black Death of 1348-49 is
certain, but we know very little about it, and indeed the history of
the house is negligible until, in the beginning of the fifteenth
century the whole system of Cluny was called in question and it was
claimed on behalf of Lewes that it should be raised to an abbacy with
the power to profess monks. It will be remembered that the Abbot of
Cluny--the only Abbot within the Congregation--alone could profess, and
in times of war, such as the fourteenth century, this must have been
very inconvenient. Indeed we read of men who had been monks their whole
life long, but had never been professed at all. It is therefore not
surprising that such a claim should at last have been put forward. It
is equally not surprising that such a claim was not allowed. The Abbot
of Cluny refused to raise Lewes to the rank of an abbey, but he granted
the Prior the privilege of professing his monks; this in 1410. So
things continued till in 1535, the infamous Layton was sent by Thomas
Cromwell to inquire into the state of the Priory of Lewes, to nose out
any scandal he could and to invent what he could not find. His methods
as applied to Lewes are notorious for their insolence and brutality. He
professes to have found the place full of corruption and rank with
treason. And in this he was wise, for his master Cromwell wanted the
house for himself. Upon November 16, 1537, the Priory of St Pancras at
Lewes was surrendered. It was then served by a Prior and twenty-three
monks and eighty servi; and it and its lands were granted by the
King to Thomas Cromwell.

Such was the end of the most famous Cluniac house in England, the
sanctuary founded by that De