Page:The Victoria History of the County of Surrey Volume 3.djvu/311

 REIGATE HUNDRED

��REIGATE

��which has been artificially scarped, forming a plateau of about 300 ft. from east to west, by 200 ft. wide at the western end and 1 50 ft. at the eastern end. At the foot of the scarp is a ditch, of varying widths, from 60 to 3 oft. The crest of the scarp had a stone wall round it at one period. This formed the inner ward of the castle. The entrance was to the east, by the causeway, perhaps once broken by a drawbridge, across the ditch. There was an entrance tower standing here 1 20 years ago. The dwelling- house was latterly, and probably always, at the wider western end. Outside the north-western part of the ditch, up the hill, was an extensive outwork. This part of the site is partly covered by private grounds, and has been cut into by building and a road, and is hard to define exactly. From this outwork or barbican a wet ditch ran eastwards, and then south- wards in a curve. The south ditch of the inner ward is continued eastward for about 3 20 ft., and has a short limb reaching north and divided from the south-eastern extremity of the wet ditch by a bank. The wet ditch and extended dry ditch inclose an outer ward of nearly twice the area of the inner ward, and lying north-east and east of it.

From the northern outwork or barbican a wall was carried round the west and south sides of the castle on the outside of the dry fosse round the inner ward, making a narrow outer ward here also. Some small parts of this outer wall seem to remain in the garden walls of the houses on the south side of the castle, being the only stonework left in situ with any claims to antiquity.

The castle was an important place in the line of fortresses between London and the south coast. It immediately commanded a way north and south, by Bell Lane and Nutley Lane up the downs ; a natural line of communication on the dry ground ran east and west immediately below it, through Reigate High Street, and it was not far from the great cross-county route along the chalk to the north. It surrendered to the French and the barons 8 June 1216." It passed back into the regent's hands in 1217. In the campaigns of 1 264 it is not mentioned, but was probably held for the king till after Lewes, while its near neighbour, Blechingley, de Clare's castle, was certainly held for the barons. In 1 268, after the violent affray in Westminster Hall, when Alan de la Zouche was attacked by the Earl of Surrey and his men, and received wounds from which he ultimately died, the earl shut himself up in Reigate Castle and defied justice till Edward, the king's son, appeared before his walls, and Henry of Cornwall and the Earl of Gloucester persuaded him to surrender." As in so many other cases, the decay of the castle was so gradual that no definite period can be assigned to it. Roland Lenthal stated in 1441 that the houses within the castle were ruinous. 11 Camden described it as 'now neglected and decayed with age.' A survey of 1622 " calls it 'a decayed castle with a very small house." This is the interior dwelling-house, rebuilt at some earlier period. In 1648 the Earl of Holland's Royalist insurrectionaries came to Reigate and skirmished with Major Audley's soldiers on Redhill. The Royalists occupied the decayed castle, which was no doubt in some sense defensible, but

��abandoned it next day, when the pursuing Parlia- mentary commander Livesay thought it worth while to leave a garrison in it. ls While this was in progress, 4 July 1648, Parliament referred to the Derby Home Committee an order to make Reigate Castle, among other places, incapable of being used as a fortress. 16 This order no doubt completed the ruin. In 1782 Watson " gives a contemporary view from the south, which shows the small house, a one-storied building with two wings, the Gate Tower, apparently of about 14th-century date, in good preservation, a round tower to the south-west and a bit of ruinous wall between these two towers. It is badly drawn, and the Gate Tower is in the wrong place, according to his own plan, and judging from the existing causeway over the ditch.

Some French jetons and a large mediaeval spur have been found in the castle.

The caverns are under the western part of the inner inclosure. There is an entrance from the middle of the castle, and another, perhaps more recent, from the western ditch. The sandstone of the hill yields readily to excavation, and is hard enough to stand unsupported. The caverns were in all prob- ability dry cellars and storehouses to begin with, enlarged later from busy idleness, which is also responsible for the sham antique gateway of the castle, or merely from commercial desire to dig and sell the fine sand which is in great request. The survey of 1622 mentions ' special white sand within the lord's castle." The tradition that William de Warenne's castle was made a rendezvous for a secret meeting of the barons who were about to demand the Great Charter from the king, is equivalent to saying that the Reform Bill of 1832 was elaborated in the Carlton Club. Moreover the combined barons went nowhere near Reigate except in legend.

Some of the same uncertainty which prevails about the date of the castle exists about the date of the foundation of the priory. This can be more approxi- mately dated, however, for it was founded by William de Warenne, who died in 1 240, and by Isabel his wife." It was grievously decayed before the Suppres- sion, when its revenues were only 68 a year, and there were only the prior and three Austin Canons residing in it. The Priory House, on its site, the pro- perty of Lady Henry Somerset, is not the old Priory.

When Lord William Howard, first Lord Howard of Effingham, obtained the priory estate by grant from Henry VIII he must have demolished a great part of the buildings, including probably the church, and transformed what remained into a mansion for his own use, and this house was in turn almost entirely rebuilt or refronted in 1779. The main or south front of this last period is of pleasing elevation in Reigate stone, consisting of a long central portion with a pediment in the middle, above which rises a cupola, and projecting wings, the whole under a steep-pitched tiled roof. The simple and dignified style suggests a date of a century earlier. Parts of the walls in the rear are those of the priory buildings perhaps of the refectory in particular a range of plain stone corbels, and what appears to be the lower part of a corbclled-out chimney belonging to an upper story.

��11 Ann. Men. (Rolls Ser.), ii, z8?. " Flora Hi:r. (Rolls Ser.), iii, 18. u Mins. Accts. Gen. Ser. bdle. 1 1 zo,no.z.

��14 Copied in the Ct R.

" y.C.H. Surr. ii, 418-19.

w Whitelocke, Memoriali, date cited.

2 3 I

��" In hi Hiit. of the Earls of Warren. 18 f.C.H. Surr. ii, 105-6.

�� �