The lost Sussex village wiped out by the Black Death

With a commanding view of the Channel, such was its importance that King Edward I visited Exceat in 1305 while touring the Lewes area.

But, by the mid-1400s, this once bustling village was abandoned.

The remains of its buildings and church disintegrated and was entombed in the landscape for hundreds of years until a local boy spotted the outline of a building in a dry field, leading to archaeological excavation in 1913 that revealed the foundations of Exceat Church.

Anooshka Rawden, the cultural heritage lead for the South Downs National Park has been looking at the rise and fall of the settlement that has some of the most beautiful views in England.

Anooshka Rawden, the cultural heritage lead for the South Downs National Park (Image: SDNPA)

Exceat was a fishing village founded in Saxon times and the name may have come from “æc-sceat”, an oak grove, or from the Old English for “the place of the Aese”, who were the first kings of Kent.

After centuries as an important village in a prominent coastal location, all was to change by the 1300s. A series of major catastrophic events, most notably the Black Death, were to wreak havoc on its small rural population.

The Black Death came to England in around 1347.

The term ‘Black Death’ is not actually medieval, but a 17th century title for what was one of the most severe pandemics in human history – the bubonic plague.

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Estimates have suggested that between 40 and 60 per cent of England’s population died. 

The village may also have fallen victim to the Hundred Years War with France.

The French raised the Sussex coast in the 1370s and 1380s and Exceat’s location meant it was vulnerable.

Depopulation and decline had set in and by 1460 only two parishioners are recorded as still living at Exceat, called Richard Raye and John Algar.

They petitioned the Bishop of Chichester to join the congregation of West Dean and, in 1528, the parish of Exceat merged with West Dean.

You can find the site of the village on the country park trail route on this map of Seven Sisters Country Park (Image: SDNPA)

Fast forward to a hot summer’s day in 1913, just a year before the outbreak of the First World War. A teenager walking on the hills spotted some indentations in the fields above the Cuckmere River.

Maurice Theodore Lawrance, the 15-year-old son of the rector of West Dean Church, told his father, the Reverend George William Lawrance, and, with the help a local antiquarian Mr RH Verrall, some stone foundations were discovered.

Permission was later granted for Sussex Archaeological Society to excavate the site and the building they eventually found was Exceat Church. The excavations revealed a tiny church, probably among the smallest in Sussex with a nave only 31 feet.

If you visit Seven Sisters Country Park today, in amongst the chalk grassland, you’ll find a large Portland stone block with the graving “Here formerly stood the Parish Church of Excete”.

Trevor Beattie, chief executive of the national park, at the Exceat site at Seven Sisters Country Park (Image: SDNPA)

Today Exceat is one of a number of “ghost villages”, or deserted medieval villages, in Britain.

Maurice Theodore Lawrance tragically died aged 18, having been killed in action in France during the First World War.

He has no known grave but is commemorated at All Saints Church, West Dean.