As early as the 6th century Wye was a royal vill, and the royal court would have resided in the vicinity of Wye Court for part of the year. In the 13th century it was a Royal Manor whose Liberty extended as far as Hawkhurst. The Palace complex by then was at Wye Court

..... the family was numerous in Kent. Their original seat was at Raymond's, near Rye. They " were for a great length of time Stewards to the Abbot and Convent of Battel for their lands near this place ; and it is probable that it was once the original stock from which the Raymonds of Essex, Norfolk and other counties, derived their extraction. The family was extinct here before the thirty-sixth year of King Henry VIII" — Hasted's Kent.

From this Kentish stock Philipots, in his Villare Cantianum, concurs with Hasted in deriving the Raymonds of Essex. Their first move, however, appears to have been to Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, where we find Philip Raymond, in the sixteenth century, married to a county heiress who brought him Essendon. Their great-grandson John (who was living in 1627) bought Belchamp-Walter of the Wentworths, and transplanted the Raymonds to this new home in Essex, where they still flourish. No doubt it was unwittingly that they thus returned to the county in which the name had originally taken root at the Conquest.

This is popularly supposed to have been a list of William the Conqueror's companions preserved at Battle Abbey, on the site of his great victory over Harold.

It is known to us only from 16th century versions of it published by Leland, Holinshed and Duchesne, all more or less imperfect and corrupt. Holinshed's is much the fullest, but of its 629 names several are duplicates. The versions of Leland and Duchesne, though much shorter, each contain many names found in neither of the other lists. It was so obvious that several of the names had no right to figure on the roll, that Camden, as did Dugdale after him, held them to have been interpolated at various times by the monks, "not without their own advantage."

Modern writers have gone further, Sir Egerton Brydges denouncing the roll as "a disgusting forgery," and EA Freeman dismissing it as "a transparent fiction." An attempt to vindicate the roll was made by the last duchess of Cleveland, whose Battle Abbey Roll (3 vols, 1889) is the best guide to its contents.

It is probable that the character of the roll has been quite misunderstood. It is not a list of individuals, but only of family surnames, and it seems to have been intended to show which families had "come over with the Conqueror," and to have been compiled about the 14th century. The compiler appears to have been influenced by the French sound of names, and to have included many families of later settlement, such as that of Grandson, which did not come to England from Savoy till two centuries after the Conquest. The roll itself appears to be unheard-of before and after the 16th century, but other lists were current at least as early as the 15th century, as the duchess of Cleveland has shown.

In 1866 a list of the Conqueror's followers, compiled from Domesday and other authentic records, was set up in Dives church by Léopold Delisle, and is printed in the duchess' work. Its contents are naturally sufficient to show that the Battle Roll is worthless.