​RAPE, a territorial division of the county of Sussex, England,formerly used for various administrative purposes. There arenow six of these divisions, Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber,Arundel and Chichester, but the latter two apparently formed asingle rape at the date of the compilation of Domesday Book.The word, which in England is peculiar to Sussex, is usually saidto be closely related to the Icelandichrepp, a small territorialdivision which in most, but not in all, cases is identical with theparish; but this explanation, which is unsatisfactory on institutionalgrounds, has also been declared impossible for philologicalreasons. As an alternative explanation it has beensuggested, that “rape” is an early form of the word “rope”;and that the divisions were so called because they were measuredand allotted by the rope. Some confirmation of this is to befound in the Words of the Norman chronicler, Dudo of St Quentin,who states that Rollo in distributing Neustria “suisfidelibus terrain funiculo divisit” (J. P. Migne,Patrologiae Cursus completus,tom. cxli. p. 652). It is possible that therapes represent the shires of the ancient kingdom of Sussex,especially as in the 12th century they had sheriffs of their own.But there is no evidence of the existence of the rape before theNorman Conquest, except such as may be gathered fromDomesday Book, and this is far from convincing. After theConquest each rape had its own lord, and all the 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 differedfrom other honours and baronies by the fact that the lands ofits knights were not scattered over England, but lay together ina continuous tract. In form the rapes were parallel bands of landrunning north and south, and each of them contained a differentnumber of hundreds. The place in which the lord’s castle wassituate ultimately gave its name to the rape; but in DomesdayBook the rapes are often described by the names of their lords,and this is always so in that work in the case of Bramber, whichbelonged to William de Briouze (rapam Willelmi de Braoza).