Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 98

This modestly-priced local publication sets out to narrate the history of the lower reaches of one of Sussex’s most important rivers, the Ouse, as it cuts through the South Downs at Lewes and runs with some difficulty to the English Channel at Seaford and later at the New Haven (Newhaven today). It traces both the prehistory and history of the lower Ouse valley, demonstrating the complex interactions between human residence and economic activity on the one hand, and the vagaries of this riverine environment on the other. When farms and parishes can first be discerned it is clear that such interactions resulted in the well-known strip pattern whereby downland sheep runs, chalk scarp-foot settlement and open-field farming, and the Ouse meadows, were well integrated into a sheep/corn farming system, reliant on droveways, tracks and hedgerows running at right-angles to the river. Saltings as well as abundant meadowland are recorded in Domesday Book.

The Ouse was rarely, however, entirely compliant. For centuries it proved difficult to harness it to human requirements, and flooding was always a danger. Margaret Thorburn details the schemes to alleviate this danger, beginning with the cooperative efforts of the medieval period which frequently involved the large priory of St. Pancras on the southern edge of Lewes, and which overlooked the brooklands and had proprietorial rights there. Ditches had to be kept open, mills controlled, dykes and sluices cared for. Such activities were intensified in the early modern period, with greater attention to repairs to the river embankments and the levying of scots to ensure the cleaning of the tributary sewers. The pattern of drainage channels extended to Lewes itself, or more particularly to its eastern suburb at Cliffe, growing up around the river. Periodic flooding remained a problem however, and engineering reports in the eighteenth century recommended widening and straightening the main channel to allow for a better flow whilst not obstructing the river-based trade between Lewes and the coast. The work to maintain the river defences has been continuous and not always successful. The book demonstrates how even as recently as 2000 the Cliffe area and the lower brooklands were badly flooded, and in 2002 a Flood Defence Strategy was drawn up. The modern Environment Agency continues to face an issue that has simply not gone away.

This book, by a local author, perhaps assumes too much local knowledge of places around Lewes and there are instances where unfortunate errors have crept in. A reference to coombe formation on the South Downs should place the process in the glacial period before 12,000 BP (p.2), Ashburnham was not a medieval ecclesiastical estate (p.12) and Sir William Dugdale was writing in the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth (p.13). In terms of agricultural history there are some errors too: the integration of arable with animal husbandry was certainly not a ‘new formula’ in the later eighteenth century but had been a practice since at least the medieval period if not before. And the work of the nineteenth-century improvers certainly ended neither the practice of fallowing nor the existence of permanent pasture on the downland tops (pp.28–9). These, together with some proof-reading problems, will detract a little from what is otherwise a good synthesis of published material on this fascinating landscape. Primary sources are also deployed, drawing on local archival material from the eighteenth century and the later records of the commission of sewers. There is something in this valuable book for the landscape historian as well as those with interests in agrarian history.