RAPE

This article appears in Volume V22, Page 900 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PYR-RAY

RAPE , a territorial division of the county of Sussex, England, formerly used for various administrative purposes. There are now six of these divisions, Hastings, Pevensey,

Lewes

LEWES
LEWES, CHARLES LEE (1740–1803)

, Bramber, Arundel and Chichester, but the latter two apparently formed a single rape at the date of the compilation of Domesday Book. The word, which in England is

peculiar

PECULIAR

to Sussex, is usually said to be closely related to the Icelandic hrepp, a small territorial division which in most, but not in all, cases is identical with the parish; but this explanation, which is unsatisfactory on institutional grounds, has also been declared impossible for philological reasons. As an alternative explanation it has been suggested, that " rape " is an early form of the word " rope "; and that the divisions were so called because they were measured and allotted by the rope. Some confirmation of this is to be found in the words of the Norman chronicler, Dudo of St Quentin, who states that Rollo in distributing

Neustria

NEUSTRIA

" suis fidelibus terrain funiculo divisit " (J. P.

Migne

MIGNE, JACQUES PAUL (1800-1875)

, Patrologiae Cursus cornpletus, torn. cxli. p. 652). It is possible that the rapes represent the shires of the ancient kingdom of Sussex, especially as in the 12th

century

CENTURY (from Lat. centuria, a division of a hundred men)

they had sheriffs of their own. But there is no evidence of the existence of the rape before the Norman Conquest, except such as may be gathered from Domesday Book, and this is far from convincing. After the Conquest each rape had its own lord, and all the

land

LAND

within it, save that which belonged to the king or to ecclesiastical tenants, was held of the lord. Thus the rape as a lordship only differed from other honours and baronies by the fact that the lands of its knights were not scattered over England, but lay together in a continuous

tract

TRACT (from Lat. tractare, to treat of a matter, through Provencal tractat and Ital. trattato)

. In form the rapes were parallel bands of

land

LAND

running north and

south

SOUTH
SOUTH, ROBERT (1634–1716)

, and each of them contained a different number of hundreds. The place in which the lord's castle was situate ultimately gave its name to the rape; but in Domesday Book the rapes are often described by the names of their lords, and this is always so in that

work

WORK

in the case of Bramber, which belonged to William de Briouze (rapam Willelmi de Braoza).

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