Pevensey

PEVENSEY, a village in Sussex, England, 65 m. S.S.E. from London by the S.R. Pop. (1921) 764. It was the landing place of William the Norman on his way to conquer, and was the caput of the rape of Pevensey, granted by William to the earl of Mortain and subsequently became the Honour of the Eagle. Some time before the reign of Edward I. the town of Pevensey was made a member of Hastings and shared the liberties of the Cinque Ports. By an act of 1883 it ceased to exist as a borough. The decline of Pevensey was caused by the recession of the sea. The outer wall, with towers, of the castle is Roman, and is generally considered to have enclosed the strong town of Anderida. Within are the ruins, principally of the 13th century, but in part Norman, of the castle proper, with a keep and four round towers. The church of St. Nicholas, close to the castle, is Early English. It is doubtful whether Pevensey was the scene of Caesar's landing in 55 B.C.

PEW,

a term, in its most usual meaning, for a fixed seat in a church, usually enclosed, slightly raised from the floors, and composed of wood framing, mostly with ornamented ends. Some bench ends are certainly of Decorated character, and some have been considered to be of the Early English period. They are sometimes of plain oak board, 21 to 3 in. thick, chamfered, and with a necking and finial generally called a poppy head; others are plainly panelled with bold cappings ; in others the panels are ornamented with tracery or with the linen pattern, and sometimes with running foliages. The large pews with high enclosures, known

familiarly as "horse-boxes," and common in English churches during the i8th and early part of the 19th centuries, have nearly all been cleared away. The church of Whitby, in Yorkshire, is perhaps the best surviving example of an unaltered interior.

At common law all seats in a parish church are for the common use of all the parishioners, and every parishioner has a right to a seat without paying for it. As against the assignment and dis position of seats by the ordinary, acting through the church wardens, two kinds of appropriation can be set up (a) by the grant of a faculty by the ordinary, and (b) by prescription, based on the presumption of a lost faculty. Such faculties are rarely granted now, they were formerly common ; the grant was to a man and his family "so long as they remain inhabitants of a certain house in the parish." The letting of pews in parish churches became common in the i6th century, but there are some earlier instances of the use, for example at St. Ewens, Bristol, in See A. Heales, History and Law of Church Seats and Pews (1872) ; Phillimore, Eccles. Law (1896), ii. 1424 sq.