Page:Sussex Archaeological Collections, volume 6.djvu/32

 decide the question, when it is asked concerning a race, where there is no positive evidence of any other kind for or against, whether they came in with the Conqueror. Tayleur's list of the commanders of the host who embarked with the duke at Saint Valeries is essentially different from the lists above described. So is a little fragment of the followers of William de Moion, preserved by Leland, in his 'Collectenea' (vol. v, p. 202). Many names of persons in the expedition are also to be found in Ordericus, William of Poictiers, Wace, and others. A collection of the names, critically compiled, is a work yet to be performed.

What I have now ventured to offer to the consideration of the members of the Sussex Archaeological Society requires no summary: and I beg to conclude with a few more general remarks on the Abbey of Battle itself. We have an account of it of course in the great English Monasticon, but it was impossible, in a work like that, to intermix with the dry detail anything of sentiment or feeling, so as to give animation to the narrative, or so as to make prominent any peculiar or remarkable characteristic of each of these venerable foundations. Yet how much is there in the history of some of them; how much in the history of Battle in particular, to make it the subject of the study of any one in whom is united the disposition to minute research, with the ability to take comprehensive views of the events of ages past. How much also might taste, feeling, and the religious and the patriotic sentiment do with such a subject as this. I do not mean that the writer should convert his history into a romance, or should leave us in doubt where the fact ends, and the fiction begins. There was a gentleman, whom I had the pleasure of knowing, who had formed a just conception of what I mean, but who sank into the grave in quite the bloom of life, leaving only a very few specimens of what such a work in his hands would have been, among which is your own Abbey of Lewes.

The peculiar interest of Battle lies in many circumstances: the high authenticity of its history; the vast amount of manuscript relating to it; the vast extent of the building, and the magnificent appearance which it must have presented in many of the approaches to it; the large amount of ruin