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A "rape" was an administrative sub-division of a county used in Kent and Sussex. Its history stretches back to before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Rapes were divided into "hundreds".
The rapes of Sussex are basically a series of six rectangular areas covering the county from west to east in the order Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, Hastings.
This map of Bramber Rape is a portion of a map in Wikimedia Commons and is reproduced here under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License CC BY-SA 3.0 with credit to XrysD. The original source was
- "Administrative map of the ancient county of Sussex in 1832. Showing Rapes, Hundreds, Boroughs. Source data on parish boundaries - Kain, R.J.P., and Oliver, R.R. (2001) "Historic parishes of England and Wales: Electronic Map - Gazetteer - Metadata", Colchester: History Data Service."
The darkest shade used in each rape denote the ancient Boroughs. The remainder of the shades used are simply employed to distinguish one hundred from its neighbours. Note that some hundreds had detached sections.
For further reading
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Introductions to the volumes on Bramber Rape from the Victoria County Histories series produced by British History Online.
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