Page:VCH Surrey 1.djvu/413

 POLITICAL HISTORY control of the castles and communications of the south, including Surrey. We must look for a moment beyond the county itself to understand the part which it played. The barons held London, the Cinque Ports, except perhaps the castle of Hastings, certainly the castle of Dover, and also the castles of Canterbury, Tonbridge and Blechingley. The king's friends held Rochester, Farnham, Guildford, Reigate, and the castles of the mid- Sussex ports, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes and Pevensey. The king's army was in the midlands, a hostile country, and his object was to transfer the war to the south and to master the coast sufficiently to enable his foreign friends to communicate with and support him. His wife was gathering an army abroad. The barons meantime were besieging Rochester, hoping to complete their hold of the roads from the Kentish ports. The king, probably really guided by his brother's advice or by that of Edward his son, marched from the midlands as if to attack London. Turning aside however from the city he seized Kingston Bridge. There was a bridge at Kingston in the seventh year of Henry III., 1 very possibly for long before. It was a most important passage, for there was no bridge below it except London. Above it Staines Bridge, which is said to have existed under Henry III., was the only other one in Surrey. 2 He took a castle of de Clare's at Kingston. 3 But the de Clares did not hold land at Kingston, and the castle was probably only a temporary fortification erected to guard the crossing at this time. The threat to London or the transference of the royal army to the southern counties caused de Mont- fort and de Clare to raise the siege of Rochester and to retreat to London before the king could come upon their rear. He skirted the hills south of London, being at Croydon on April 27, the same day on which he left Kingston. He marched probably by the old track, of which the Ridgeway at Wimbledon is a part. He dispersed a small party of baronial troops who had been left in observation of Rochester, took de Warenne with him out of the fortress, stormed de Clare's castle of Tonbridge, capturing the Countess of Gloucester, and went to the south coast, where, with de Warenne's castles and lands as his base, he prepared to establish himself to await the coming of his foreign allies. De Montfort and de Clare determined to fight before the king could further strengthen himself. Their direct road for reaching him, and indeed the only road to the coast now open to them, was the old Roman road which ran near Croydon, through Godstone, near de Clare's castle of Blechingley, and thence probably by two branches towards the mouth of the Ouse on the one hand and Pevensey on the other, with perhaps a branch westward to Shoreham also. The castles at or near the ex- tremities of all these lines, at Pevensey, Lewes and Bramber, were in the hands of the king's partisans. On the left flank of the barons as they advanced was the castle of Tonbridge, now occupied by a considerable royalist garrison, who were not far by a cross march from the baronial line of communications in Surrey. It was a bold venture by the baronial 1 Close Rolls, 7 Hen. III. m. iv. * There is no record of Chertsey Bridge so early. 8 Hemingburgh, i. 313, E. Hut. S. ed. 345 Z*