Tour of the South East: Lewes

The next day, we rose early and left the Travelodge with just a coffee and a Nutri-Grain for breakfast, as Rachel wanted to drive to Lewes so she could look at something in the East Sussex Records Office there. It was hot and sunny again, and although I’d ended up rather enjoying our atmospheric drive through the rain-ridden landscape of Folkestone and Hastings (Bexhill notwithstanding), I was pleased to see that splendid orb once more gracing the skies above us, bathing us in its golden warmth like … well, you get the idea. It was a nice day, and that was just the sort of day I wanted for looking around Lewes.

Mind you, the downside to the heat is the dehydration it brings, especially to a hydrophile like me. When we got there I was already quite thirsty and wanted a long, cool draught of Coke or Sprite or mineral water or cow’s piss or anything really, so long as it was sufficiently chilled and high in water content. So, as Rachel went off to the castle, beyond which was the records office, I set off to explore the charity shops and to seek out a place where I might make a purchase of some beverage or other.

My first impressions of Lewes were not favourable. I could only find one newsagents—a Martin’s—and they were offering lukewarm Lucozade at a rather inflated price. Still, I could feel the moisture seeping from my body like a dishcloth being rinsed out, so I reached into the shop’s chiller cabinet—whether it had ever been plugged in, or whether it had broken down years ago and nothing had been done about it, I couldn’t have said—and freed two bottles of original-flavoured Lucozade (whatever this original flavour actually is supposed to be: I’ve often wondered) from their moorings.

I took two, partly because I knew Rachel would want a drink later, partly because there was an offer on—two bottles for £400, I think it was—and partly because I was just that damn thirsty I could’ve drunk both of them, a whole litre of Lucozade, right there and then and not suffered any ill effects. (Well, no more than one normally suffers upon drinking this stuff.) Joining the queue of old ladies that had suddenly formed in front of me (the shop had been empty when I’d arrived), I waited, with my £400 in my hands, hoping I didn’t pass out or turn into a pile of chalky dust before I reached the front.

The queue eventually started to move a bit faster, and I was almost taken by surprise when I took my token step forward and found myself facing the woman behind the till.

‘Oh, hello,’ I said, amazed to find I still had a voice to speak with. ‘Just these two, please.’

The woman picked one of my lukewarm bottles up and examined it. ‘That offer is for the smaller bottles, not these ones. These are £600 each.’

‘Oh,’ I said, suddenly deciding to revise my staunch anti-theism and conclude that there was a God, and that he had been put in this universe just to play this sort of practical joke on me. ‘I’ll leave it then, thanks.’

And with great reluctance but a general feeling that it was the right thing to do, I retrieved the bottles from the counter and returned them to their (if anything) slightly warmer home.
So, despite the sweltering heat and my considerable thirst, I ended up without a drink. But I forged ahead, determined to make this place work for me and to coax the charity shops into turning my opinion around. From that moment on, I had success after success. I found a charming book called Forgotten English in a Cancer Research shop, which contained lots of rare words popular in centuries gone by but which have sadly, but in most cases understandably, fallen out of use. Among my favourites were ‘prickmedainty’, a sixteenth-century man-about-town who made a fuss of his hair; ‘sockdolager’, which denoted the climax or conclusion of a salesperson’s spiel; and ‘pilgarlick’, an old word for a bald head.

So, with my new purchase in my bag, and feeling glad in this heat that I didn’t have a pilgarlick (but trying not to be too much of a prickmedainty about my own pate), I headed over the river (which smelled unmistakably of vomit—really, there is no other way I can describe this unpalatable smell), to see what other shops there remained to delight me. I found a Horrible Histories book on the ‘cut-throat Celts’ for 10p in an Age Concern shop, which was just as well, as that’s the only change I had left on me. Seriously, these are great books. They’re always to be found in the kids’ section of charity shops, because they are kids’ books, but like Haribo and train sets and a woman’s breasts and other things nature designed with children in mind, a grown man can extract considerable pleasure from them. There’s even a TV series of the books now, and a series of spin-off science books. Anyway, enough about my childish obsessions.

When I left Age Concern, I strolled a little further down the road and found a Superdrug, where I purchased two bottles of 7up for £1.15 each, but since it was Buy One Get One Free, I got them both for that price. Not only were they reasonably priced, they were cold, and I gratefully devoured the contents of one of them, leaving the other for Rachel, before heading off to see what else Lewes had to offer.

Now I was suitably watered, or 7upped, I felt in a better frame of mind to appreciate Lewes. The place has a rich history, and is believed to have been the site of a Roman settlement and a Saxon town; indeed, it was the Saxons who gave the town its name. After the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror gave the town to his brother-in-law, William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey, who subsequently became a great landowner and one of the richest landowners ever to live at that; some historians reckon his fortune was worth a sum that would equate to £67 billion in our money. So this de Warenne was a sort of Bill Gates for his day, only without the computers or the dodgy hair. I was intrigued to see the castle, but for the time being I had shops on my mind.

I then found a record shop selling loads of great LPs for £1 each, so I bought a good copy of Seventh Sojourn by the Moody Blues, and Discovery by Mike Oldfield. I was surprised to learn, when I looked through the more expensive records that were individually priced (and could give those bottles of Lucozade in Martin’s a run for their money in terms of price at that), that a lot of the records in the £1 pile had been by older, more credible artists from the 60s and 70s, while the records being offered for £5 or £6 were the sort of thing I’d seen countless times in every charity shop and at every car-boot sale I’d ever been to. Weird. It was a great shop though, and I was feeling even more favourable towards Lewes now, so I stopped to chat to a friend of the proprietor for five minutes about the Moody Blues, to whom he’d been introduced at school in 1975 by his music teacher. That’s the sort of music teachers we need in schools, methinks. Seriously, if you don’t know the work of the Moody Blues at all, go on Youtube—or even better, Amazon, and spend a few quiz on one of their albums—and let yourself in for a real treat. On the Threshold of a Dream is perhaps their finest all-round album, but everyone knows their song ‘Nights in White Satin’, because it’s the only song anyone ever knows which contains a mellotron in it. They’re the best band of their time, far better than the Beatles and with a real experimental edge like so many bands of that time. They’re the best thing to come out of Birmingham after Cadbury’s chocolate—and, like Cadbury’s chocolate, no longer exist, sadly.

The record shop had been down a side-street coming off the main High Street, so I traipsed back up to the main road and resumed walking up the hill, away from Vomit River and towards the castle. The main street is on a hill, and it’s quite a steep incline—this was my second time climbing it, and even the new-found energy provided by the 7up was beginning to fade. So I walked to the toilets, which were down the market street, partly because I needed to answer a call for a spot of micturition and partly because I wanted to check out the lavatorial amenities of this town. Unfortunately, Market Street involved double-backing on myself a bit and heading down the hill again, down a small road running semi-parallel to the High Street. Still, the toilets were very clean, and it was a nice day for it. I stopped on my way back to the main road to take a look at the information boards on the wall (not in the toilets, but nearby) which told all about Tom Paine, he who wrote the Rights of Man, and his journey to America. Apparently he’d come to Lewes in the 1760s, though what he’d made of the toilets has apparently been lost in the mists of time.

I determined that I should have a look in at least one very expensive bookshop while I was here, so I sought out the fifteenth-century bookshop that presumably had sold copies of Chaucer and Gower and books on Troy and obscure Latin texts during the time of Henry VI. But after thirty seconds in there I realised I would have to win the Premium Bonds quite a few times before I could afford to buy anything in there, so I fled, feeling poor and unworthy. So I headed back to the castle, and while waiting outside the gift shop I spotted what I hadn’t noticed before—the castle shop was selling second-hand books! So in I went, and managed to pick up a copy of four medieval Morality plays (though written between 1400 and 1562) for £1.50. I could’ve spent even more in there, but was wary of being extravagant. Strange, the attitudes we have to money. We’ll blanch at spending more than £1 on a second-hand book that we can read and reread and cherish for the rest of our lives, and yet will think nothing of going out of a Friday night and spending £50 on beer, shots, entry to some vomit-flecked night club, and a kebab on the way home. And that’s to say nothing of paying some neckless gorilla £1 to mind our coat for us while we’re in there. (I’m happy to say I haven’t indulged in this sort of reckless profligacy for a few years now, although I’m still partial to the odd kebab.)

Still, it was a rather nice bookshop, not so much a shop as a little adjunct of the main room, like a cubby-hole. There were a few other medieval and classical texts, all reasonably priced, but I decided to exercise some self-restraint. They also had a copy of Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which I’ve been after for years, but it was a modern translation, so I didn’t buy that as well. Call me a masochist, but I like to read Middle English as God, or at least William Langland, intended.

After that, it was time for us both to take a stroll around Lewes Castle. It was originally called Bray Castle for reasons which elude me right now, but what I do remember is that, like Lincoln Castle, it is unusual in having two mottes rather than the more customary one. (The motte is the mound on which the main keep is constructed, while the bailey is the bit on flat down beneath the motte, where the horses are kept and such.) There is a fourteenth-century Barbican (the castle gateway to you and me) which is well preserved and one of the first things you see when you approach the castle. After we’d looked inside the Barbican, we continued our ascent to the castle itself, which commands some spectacular views. Lewes is only a small market town, and you can see far, far beyond its limits from up there. I was mildly surprised we couldn’t see Hastings or Brighton from here, or the coast.

Still, you can see for some miles in all directions. There are some helpful information boards directing you to the part of town where the remains of the medieval priory stand, and the Martyrs’ Memorial which is situated among some houses on the outskirts of the town. The memorial is a stone obelisk that commemorates the seventeen Protestants who were burnt in Lewes in 1555-7, during the reign of Bloody Mary. Like so many of the two-hundred-odd men and women who were burned, their names are unknown to all but the most avid readers of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, but I did know that this memorial, like the one in Oxford, did not stand on the precise spot where the burnings had taken place, but some distance—in Lewes’s case, a considerable distance—away. Many of them were in fact burned in front of the Star Inn, in the town centre. The inn is now the Town Hall, but it’s in vain that you’ll look for a plaque on that building commemorating the martyrdoms. Unless you happened to know about the memorial in advance, or the information board happened to catch your eye while you looked around the castle tower, this little snippet of East Sussex history would pass you right by. Even in Maidstone they have a modest plaque in the town centre which marks the spot where seven people had been burned for their faith.

Still, we didn’t go out to have a look at the memorial, because, to be honest, I didn’t think there’d be much to see there. The fact that we knew it was there, and that Lewes’s history extended beyond the castle and its walls, was enough for me. And to think that our coming to Lewes might never have happened, had it not been for the records office!

On our way back to the car, I found another charity shop which contains books and LPs, and managed to pick up a copy of Days of Future Passed by The Moody Blues for £1. It was a good day.