St. Clement's at £5, and All Saints' at £5 6s. 8d., give only £10 6s. 8d . for the Valley of the Bourne. In this year, Hastings equipped but three ships ; in 1294 the same number attended the Warden , Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, to Gascony; and Hastings had only one ship in the fleet which accompanied Edward I. on his last inroad into Scotland.
In 1339, the town suffered for the first time on record from a foreign army. The Frenchmen " sore troubled this realm by sea, and landed at Hastings on the feast of Corpus Christi, and there burnt some houses and slew some people."[1] It is a singular coincidence that exactly the same date is assigned for the commencement of the "depopulation of the Priory Valley by reason of the ravages of the sea ;" for we have documentary evidence that up to 1340, the western parishes were comparatively populous, and that Hastings at that period was nearly coextensive with our modern town. In Bishop Prady's register of the date of 1440, we read that within a hundred years, St. Andrews, St. Leonards, St.Michaels, and St. Margaret (which is now known as St. Mary Magdalene, from a hospital so dedicated , the site of which is fixed by the " Chapel" farm on the Bohemia Road ,) had been depopulated and diminished by the inundation of the sea. The obvious inference being, that a century before, which takes us back to 1339 or 1340 , they were in a flourishing condition.
The history of this hundred years is a very melancholy -
- ↑ Southey's Naval History of England i, 237.
