Source: Modern understanding of the layout and development of the Priory derives largely from archaeological excavations carried out since the 1840s, most extensively by George Somers Clarke. The accepted plan of the Priory was drawn by archaeologist and antiquary Sir
William Henry St. John Hope and architect Sir
Harold Brakspear in 1906 based upon archaeology, documented accounts and hypothesis. Aspects of this have been better explored by later research and excavation. The structural bay division shown of the nave is probably wrong, being elongated in a way inconsistent with Romanesque planning modules and different from that of the choir, the Lady Chapel is missing and certain lay buildings are also not shown. This is, nonetheless, the best guide available and a potent diagram. The buildings accommodated an establishment of around 50 monks at any one time throughout the 12th and 13th centuries as well as lay incumbents and visitors. The precinct buildings were built for sacred and temporal functions and were of
ashlar stone faced chalk and flint core construction. Quarr limestone shipped from the Saxon quarries on the
Isle of Wight was used in the first phase of construction.
Caen limestone, imported from Normandy was used with Sussex marble details for the second phase including the construction of the great church. The Priory had its own masons' yard, it manufactured decorated glazed floor tiles and had a school of sacred painting that worked throughout Sussex. The calibre of surviving figurative carvings that are displayed at the British Museum is of a highly sophisticated order.
Great Church of St Pancras The first Cluniac Priory church was a reconstruction in stone of a Saxon timber church. This may correspond to the single cell structure of which the lower sections of wall and the altar survive, now known as the Infirmary Chapel. This is orientated to a different
liturgical east from the major church (which is 5.5 degrees closer to current magnetic east) but the same orientation as that of St Michael, Lewes, also a Saxon foundation and of St John, Southover. By the twelfth century it had become the practice to orient a church to face the rising sun on the day of the saint in whose name the church was dedicated, in this case, 12 May, to which orientation the major church appears to have been aligned. The major church was constructed after 1140 AD with the west towers recorded as unfinished in 1268 AD. Of this work nothing survives above ground level. The design of the church was based upon that of its mother church at Cluny, then the largest church in the world, now referred to as
Cluny III. Comparison with the surviving Romanesque fabric of the daughter Priory of Castle Acre is relevant. The church had an internal length of 128m (420 feet) from west door to chancel apse, with an internal vault height of 28m (93 feet) at the altar and 32m (105 feet) at the crossing. This was the largest church in Sussex, being longer than Chichester Cathedral including its Lady Chapel, and is comparable in scale to the original form of
Ely Cathedral or the surviving form of
Lichfield Cathedral.
Priory buildings . These comprised the cloister and chapter house directly south of the
church and the
dorter,
reredorter,
frater and
infirmary to south and east, of which sections survive above ground, as well as the
Prior's lodging and entrance gates to the west of which fragments also survive. The dove house to the south-west was a large building that survived until the early nineteenth century. It is reasonable to assume a pattern of bakeries, fish ponds and other food production and storage buildings in this area of a type and layout identified at Castle Acre and other English Cluniac houses. Subterranean cisterns and drainage courses as well as fresh water conduits have been identified by excavation.
Hospitium, now St John the Baptist, Southover The original hospitium is now used as the local parish church. The twelfth-century nave arcade, with short drum piers and un-moulded arches perhaps divided the men's from the women's ward. The neo-Norman south chapel of 1847 houses the bones of William and Gundrada de Warenne which were unearthed in two lead cists by railway
navvies constructing the
Brighton to Lewes railway through the site of the Priory chapter house in 1845. On the floor of the chapel lies the original black
Tournai marble tombstone from the Priory carved to the memory of Gundrada that had been incorporated into a
Tudor period memorial in the church of St Margaret,
Isfield.
Precinct walls The most extensive surviving mediaeval structures are the precinct walls along the north (140 metres) and east (170 metres) sides of the Dripping Pan. Lengths also survive down Cockshut Road bounding the west side of the precinct. Significant secondary walls within the great precinct sub divide the land, notably the south wall of the Dripping Pan. The precinct walls have otherwise generally been removed for housing development, the railway and a car park near the Mount. Fragments of the Great Gate (circa. 1200 AD) exist in a rearranged form adjacent to the east end of St John's Church. The destruction of the walls has continued in recent years following the grant of Planning Permission by
Lewes District Council to Lewes Football Club to demolish a section of the longest surviving extent of the structure along Ham Lane in 2006 for unrealised business objectives whilst a further adjacent length subsequently delaminated and fell in 2008 with repairs started in late 2009. ==Dissolution and destruction==