Chapter VII: Part 7

Under the bronze-weaponed Celts, a very different type of civilisation became possible. In the first place a more extended chieftainship resulted from the improved weapons and consequent military power; and all Britain (at least, towards the close of the Celtic domination) became amalgamated into considerable kingdoms, some of which seem to have spread over several modern shires. Sussex, however, enclosed by its barrier of forest, would naturally remain a single little principality of itself, held, at least in later times, by a tribe known to the Romans as Regni. Traces of Celtic occupation are mainly confined to the Downs and the seaward slope of Sussex Proper; in the broad expanse of the Weald, they are few and far between. The Celts occupied the fertile valleys and alluvial slopes, cut down the woods by the river sides and on the plains, and built their larger and more regular camps of refuge upon the Downs, for protection against the kindred Cantii beyond the Weald, or the more distantly-related Belgæ across the Hayling tidal flats. Of these hill-forts, Hollingbury Castle, near Brighton, may be taken as a typical example. Bronze weapons and other implements of the bronze age are found in great numbers about Lewes in particular (where the isolated height, now crowned by the Norman Castle, must always have commanded the fertile river vale of the Ouse), as well as at Chichester, Bognor, and elsewhere. But the great forest, inhabited by savage beasts and still more terrible fiends, proved a barrier to their northward extension. Even if they had cleared the land, they could not have cultivated it with their existing methods; and so it is only in a few spots near the upper river valleys that we find any traces of outlying Celtic hamlets in the wilderness of the Weald. Some kind of trade, however, must have existed between the Regni and the other tribes of Britain, in order to supply them with the bronze, whose component elements Sussex does not possess. Woolsonbury, Westburton Hill, Clayton Hill, Wilmington, Hangleton Down, Plumpton Plain, and many other places along the coast have yielded large numbers of bronze implements; while the occurrence of the raw metal in lumps, together with the finished weapons, at Worthing and Beachy Head, as well the discovery of a mould for a socketed celt at Wilmington, shows that the actual foundry work was performed in Sussex itself. A beautiful torque from Hollingbury Castle attests the workmanship of the Sussex founders. No doubt the tin was imported from Cornwall, while the copper was probably brought over from the continent. Glass beads, doubtless of Southern (perhaps Egyptian) manufacture, have also been found in Sussex, with implements of the bronze age.

In the polished stone age, the county had been self-supporting, because of its possession of flint. In the bronze age it was dependent upon other places, through its non-possession of copper or tin. During the former period it may have exported weapons from Cissbury; during the latter, it must have imported the material of weapons from Cornwall and Gaul.

Before the Romans came, the Celts of Britain had learned the use of iron. Whether they ever worked the iron of the Weald, however, is uncertain. But as the ores lie near the surface, as wood (to be made into charcoal) for the smelting was abundant, and as these two facts caused the Weald iron to be extensively employed in later times, it is probable that small clearings would be made in the most accessible spots, and that rude ironworks would be established.

The same geographical causes which made Britain part of the Roman world naturally affected Sussex, as one of its component portions. Even under the Empire, however, the county remained singularly separate. The Romans built two strong fortresses at Anderida and Regnum, Pevensey and Chichester, to guard the two Gwents or lowland plains, where the shore shelves slowly to seaward; and they ran one of their great roads across the coastwise tract, from Dover to the Portus Magnus (now Porchester), near Portsmouth; but they left Sussex otherwise very much to its own devices. We know that the Regni were still permitted to keep their native chief, who probably exercised over his tribesmen somewhat the same subordinate authority which a Rájput raja now exercises under the British government. Here, again, we see the natural result of the isolation of Sussex. The Romans ruled directly in the open plains of the Yorkshire Ouse and the Thames, as we ourselves rule in the Bengal Delta, the Doáb, and the Punjáb; but they left a measure of independence to the native princes of south Wales, of Sussex, and of Cornwall, as we ourselves do to the native rulers in the deserts of Rájputana, the inaccessible mountains of Nipal, and the aboriginal hill districts of Central India.

When the Roman power began to decay, the outlying possessions were the first to be given up. The Romans had enslaved and demoralised the provincial population; and when they were gone, the great farms tilled by slave labour under the direction of Roman mortgagee-proprietors lay open to the attacks of fresh and warlike barbarians from beyond the sea. How early the fertile east coasts of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia may have fallen a prey to the Teutonic pirates we cannot say. The wretched legends, indeed, retailed to us by Gildas, Bæda, and the English Chronicle, would have us believe that they were colonised at a later period; but as they lay directly in the path of the marauders from Sleswick, as they were certainly Teutonised very thoroughly, and as no real records survive, we may well take it for granted that the long-boats of the English, sailing down with the prevalent north-east winds from the wicks of Denmark, came first to shore on these fertile coasts. After they had been conquered and colonised, the Saxon and Jutish freebooters began to look for settlements, on their part, farther south. One horde, led, as the legend veraciously assures us, by Hengest and Horsa, landed in Thanet; another, composed entirely of Saxons, and under the command of a certain dubious Ælle, came to shore on the spit of Selsea. It was from this last body that the county took its newer name of Suth-Seaxe, Suth Sexe, or Sussex. Let us first frankly narrate the legend, and then see how far it may fairly be rationalised.

In 477, says the English Chronicle--written down, it must be remembered, from traditional sources, four centuries later, at the court of Alfred the West Saxon--in 477, Ælle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing, and Cissa, came to Britain in three ships, and landed at the stow that is cleped Cymenes-ora. There that ilk day they slew many Welshmen, and the rest they drave into the wood hight Andredes-leah. In 485, Ælle, fighting the Welsh near Mearcredes Burn, slew many, and the rest he put to flight. In 491, Ælle, with his son Cissa, beset Andredes-ceaster, and slew all that therein were, nor was there after one Welshman left. Such is the whole story, as told in the bald and simple entries of the West Saxon annalist, A more dubious tradition further states that Ælle was also Bretwalda, or overlord, of all the Teutonic tribes in Britain.

And now let us see what we can make of this wholly unhistorical and legendary tale. Whether there ever was a South Saxon king named Ælle we cannot say; but that the earliest English pirate fleet on this coast should have landed near Selsea is likely enough. The marauders would not land near the Romney marshes or the Pevensey flats, where the great fortresses of Lymne and Anderida would block their passage; and they could not beach their keels easily anywhere along the cliff-girt coast between Beachy Head and Brighton; so they would naturally sail along past the marshland and the chalk cliffs till they reached the open champaign shore near Chichester. Cymenes-ora, where they are said to have landed, is now Keynor on the Bill of Selsea; and Selsea itself, as its name (correctly Selsey) clearly shows us, was then an island in the tidal flats. This was just the sort of place which the English pirates loved, for all tradition represents their first settlements as effected on isolated spots like Thanet, Hurst Castle, Holderness, and Bamborough. Thence they would march upon Regnum, the square Roman town at the harbour head, and reduce it by storm, garrisoned as it doubtless was by a handful of semi-Romanised Welshmen or Britons. The town took the English name of Cissanceaster, or Chichester. Moreover, all around the Chichester district, we still find a group of English clan villages, with the characteristic patronymic termination _ing_. Such are East and West Wittering, Donnington, Funtington, Didling, and others. It is _vraisemblable_ enough that the little strip of very low coast between Hayling Island and the Arun may have been the first original South Saxon colony. Nor is it by any means impossible that the names of Keynor and Chichester Cymenes-ora and Cissanceaster--may still enshrine the memory of two among the old South Saxon freebooters.

The tradition of a battle at Mearcredes Burn, when the Welsh were again defeated, may refer to an advance by which, a few years later, the South Saxon pirates pushed eastward along the coast, and occupied the strip of shore as far as Brighton, together with the fertile valley of the Lewes Ouse. In the first-named district we find a large group of English Clan villages, including Patching, Poling, Angmering, Goring, Worthing, Tarring, Washington, Lullington, Blatchingden, Ovingdean, Rottingdean, and many others. Amongst them is one which has clearly given rise to the name of Ælle's third son, and that is Lancing. Unfortunately for the legend, we must decide that this was really the settlement of an English clan of Lancingas, as Washington was the _tun_ or enclosure of the Weasingas, and Beddingham was the _ham_ or home of the Beddingas. Around Lewes, in like manner, we find Tarring, Malling, Piddinghoe, Bletchington, and others; while in the valley just to the east we have ten or eleven such names as Lullington, Wilmington, Folkington, and Littlington. These districts, I imagine, represent the second advance of the English conquerors.

Finally, fourteen years after the first landing, the South Saxons crossed the Downs and attacked Anderida. The Roman walls of the great fortress were thick and strong, as their remains, built over by the Norman Castle, still show; but they were defended by half-trained Welsh, who could not withstand the English onset. With the fall of Anderida, the native power was broken for ever, 'nor was there after one Welshman left.' The English tribe of the Hastingas settled at Hastings; and the South Saxons were now supreme from marsh to marsh.

But did they really exterminate the native Celt-Euskarian population? I venture to say, no. Some no doubt, especially the men, they slew; but the women and children, as even Mr. Freeman admits, were probably spared in large numbers. Even of the men, many doubtless became slaves to the Saxon lords; while others maintained themselves in isolated bands in the Weald. To this day the Euskarian type of humanity is not uncommon among the Sussex peasantry, and all the rivers still bear the Celtic names of Arun, Adur, Ouse, and Calder. That there was 'no Welshmen left' is only another way of saying that the armed Welsh resistance ceased. The Romanised Britons became English churls and serfs--nay, the very name for a serf in ordinary conversation was Weala or Welshman. The population received a new element--the English Saxons--but it was not completely changed. The Weorthingas and Goringas simply became masters of the lands formerly held by Roman owners; and the cabins of their British serfs still clustered around the wooden hall of the English lords.

Nevertheless, Sussex is one of the most thoroughly Teutonised counties in England. The proportion of Saxon blood is very marked: light hair and blue eyes, together with the broad and short English skull, are common even among the peasantry. The number of English Clan names noticed by Mr. Kemble in the towns and villages of Sussex is 68 as against 60 in almost equally Teutonic Kent, 48 in Essex, 21 in largely Celtic Dorset, 6 in Cumberland, 2 in Cornwall, and none in Monmouth. The size and number of the hundreds into which the county is divided tells us much the same tale. Each hundred was originally a group of one hundred free English families, settled on the soil, and holding in check the native subject population of Anglicised Celt-Euskarian churls. Now, in Sussex we get 61 hundreds, and in Kent 61, as against 13 in Surrey beyond the Weald (where the clan names also sink to 18), and 8 in Hertfordshire. Or, to put it another way, which I borrow from Mr. Isaac Taylor, in Sussex there is one hundred to every 23 square miles; in Kent to every 24; in Dorset to every 30; in Surrey to every 58; in Herts to every 79; in Gloucester to every 97; in Derby to every 162; in Warwick to every 179; and in Lancashire to every 302. In other words, while in Kent, Sussex, and the east the free English inhabitants clustered thickly on the soil, with a relatively small servile population, in Mercia and the west the English population was much more sparsely scattered, with a relatively great servile population. So, as late as the time of Domesday, in Kent and Sussex the slaves mentioned in the great survey (only a small part, probably, of the total) numbered only 10 per cent. of the population, while in Devon and Cornwall they numbered 20 per cent., and in Gloucestershire 33 per cent.

These results are all inevitable. It is obvious that the first attacks must necessarily be made upon the east and south coasts, and that the inland districts and the west must only slowly be conquered afterward. Especially was it easy to found Teutonic kingdoms in the four isolated regions of Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, each of which was cut off from the rest of England in early times by impassable fens, marshes, forests, or rivers. It was easy here to kill off the Welsh fighting population, to drive the remnants into the Fen Country or the Weald, to enslave the captives, the women, and the children, and to secure the Teutonic colony by a mark or border of woodland, swamp, or hill. On the other hand, Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia, with a vague and ill-defined internal border, had harder work to fight their way in against a united Welsh resistance; and it was only very slowly that they pushed across the central watershed, to dismember the unconquered remnant of the Britons at last into the three isolated bodies of Damnonia (Cornwall and Devon), Wales Proper, and Strathclyde. This is probably why the earliest settlements were made in these isolated coast regions, and why the inward progress of the other colonies was so relatively slow.

The South Saxons, then, at first occupied the three fertile bits of the county--the coast belt of Sussex Proper, the Valley of the Ouse, and the isolated Hastings district--because these were the best adapted for their strictly agricultural life. In spite of the legend of Ælle, I do not suppose that they were all united from the first under a single principality. It seems far more probable that each little clan settlement was at first wholly independent; that afterwards three little chieftainships grew up in the three fertile strips--typified, perhaps, by the story of Ælle's three sons--and that the whole finally coalesced into a single kingdom of the South Saxons, which is the state in which we find the county in Bæda's time. As ever, its boundaries were marked out for it by nature, for the Weald remained as yet an almost unbroken forest; and the names of Selsea, Pevensey, Winchelsea, Romney, and many others, show by their common insular termination (found in all isles round the British coast, as in Sheppey, Walney, Bardsea, Anglesea, Fursey, Wallasey, and so forth) that the marshland was still wholly undrained, and that a few islands alone stood here and there as masses of dry land out of their desolate and watery expanse. The Hastings district, too, fell more naturally to Sussex than to Kent, because the marshes dividing it from the former were far less formidable than those which severed it from the latter. Most probably the South Saxons intentionally aided nature in cutting off their territory from all other parts of Britain; for every English kingdom loved to surround itself with a distinct mark or border of waste, as a defence against invasion from outside. The Romans had brought Sussex within the great network of their road system; but the South Saxons no doubt took special pains to cut off those parts of the roads which led across their own frontier. At any rate, it is quite clear that Sussex did not largely participate in the general life of the new England, and that intercourse with the rest of the world was extremely limited.

The South Saxon kings probably lived for the most part at Chichester, though no doubt they had _hams_, after the royal Teutonic fashion generally, in many other parts of their territory; and they moved about from one to the other, with their suite of thegns, eating up in each what food was provided by their serfs for their use, and then moving on to the next. The isolation of Sussex is strikingly shown by its long adherence to the primitive paganism. Missionaries from Rome, under the guidance of Augustine, converted Kent as early as 597. For Kent was the nearest kingdom to the continent; it contained the chief port of entry for continental travellers, Richborough--the Dover of those days--and its king, accustomed to continental connections, had married a Christian Frankish princess from Paris. Hence Kent was naturally the first Teutonic principality to receive the faith. Next came Northumbria, Lindsey, East Anglia, Wessex, and even inland Mercia. But Sussex still held out for Thor and Woden as late as 679, three-quarters of a century after the conversion of Kent, and twenty years after Mercia itself had given way to the new faith. Even when Sussex was finally converted, the manner in which the change took place was characteristic. It was not by missionaries from beyond the Weald in Kent or Surrey, nor from beyond the marsh in Wessex. An Irish monk, Bæda tells us, coming ashore on the open coast near Chichester, established a small monastery at Bosham--even then, no doubt, a royal _ham_, as we know it was under Harold--'a place,' says the old historian significantly, 'girt round by sea and forest.' (It lies just on the mark between Wessex and the South Saxons.) Æthelwealh, the king--a curious name, for it means 'noble Welshman' (perhaps he was of mixed blood)--had already been baptized in Mercia, and his wife was the daughter of a Christian ealdorman of the Worcester-men; but the rest of the principality was heathen. The Irish monk effected nothing; but shortly after Wilfrith, the fiery Bishop of York, on one of his usual flying visits to Rome, got shipwrecked off Selsea. With his accustomed vigour, he went ashore, and began a crusade in the heathen land. He was able at once to baptize the 'leaders and soldiers'--that is to say, the free military English population; while his attendant priests--Eappa, Padda, Burghelm, and Oiddi (it is pleasant to preserve these little personal touches)--proceeded to baptize the 'plebs'--that is to say, the servile Anglicised Celt-Euskarian substratum--up and down the country villages.

It was to Wilfrith, too, that Sussex owed her first cathedral. Æthelwealh made him a present of Selsea, 'a place surrounded by the sea on every side save one, where an isthmus about as broad as a stone's-throw connects it with the mainland,' and there the ardent bishop founded a regular monastery, in which he himself remained for five years. On the soil were 250 serfs, whom Wilfrith at once set free. After the death of Aldhelm, the West Saxon bishop, in 709, Sussex was made a separate bishopric, with its seat at Selsea; and it was not till after the Norman Conquest that the cathedral was removed to Chichester. It may be noted that all these arrangements were in strict accordance with early English custom. The kings generally gave their bishops a seat near their own chief town, as Cuthbert had his see at Lindisfarne, close to the royal Northumbrian capital of Bamborough; so that the proximity of Selsea to Chichester made it the most natural place for a bishopstool; and, again, it was usual to make over spots in the fens or marshes to the monks, who, by draining and cultivating them, performed a useful secular work. No traces now remain of old Selsea Cathedral, its site having long been swallowed up by incursions of the sea. Bæda has the ordinary number of miracles to record in connection with the monastery.

As time went on, however, the isolation of Sussex became less complete. Æthelwealh had got himself into complications with Wessex by accepting the sovereignty of the Isle of Wight and the Meonwaras about Southhampton from the hands of a Mercian conqueror. Perhaps Æthelwealh then repaired the old Roman roads which led from his own _ham_ at Chichester to Portsmouth in Wessex, and broke down the mark, so as to connect his old and his new dominions with one another. At any rate, shortly after, Cædwalla, the West Saxon, an ætheling at large on the look-out for a kingdom, attacked him suddenly with his host of thegns from this unexpected quarter, killed the King himself, and harried the South Saxons from marsh to marsh. Two South Saxons thegns expelled him for a time, and made themselves masters of the country. But afterwards, Cædwalla, becoming King of the West Saxons, recovered Sussex once more, and handed it on to his successor, Ini. Hence the South Saxons had no bishopric of their own during this period, but were included in the see of the West Saxons at Winchester.

During the hundred years of the Mercian Supremacy, coincident, roughly speaking, with the eighth century, we hear little of Sussex; but it seems to have shaken off the yoke of Wessex, and to have been in subjection to the great Mercian over-lords alone. It had its own under-kings and its own bishops. Early in the ninth century, however, when Ecgberht the West Saxon succeeding in throwing off the Mercian yoke, the other Saxon States of South Britain willingly joined him against the Anglian oppressors. 'The men of Kent and Surrey, Sussex and Essex, gladly submitted to King Ecgberht.' When the royal house of the South Saxons died out, Sussex still retained a sort of separate existence within the West Saxon State, as Wales does in the England of our own day. Æthelwulf made his son under-king of Kent, Essex, Surrey, and Sussex; and so, during the troublous times of the Danish invasion, when all southern England became one in its resistance to the heathen, those old principalities gradually sank into the position of provinces or shires.

From the period of union with the general West Saxon Kingdom (which grew slowly into the Kingdom of England under Eadgar and Cnut), the markland of the Weald seems to have been gradually encroached upon from the south. Most of the names in that district are distinctly 'Anglo-Saxon' in type; by which I mean that they were imposed before the Norman Conquest, and belong to the stage of the language then in use. Even during the Roman period, settlements for iron-mining existed in the Weald, and these clearings would of course be occupied by the English colonists at a comparatively early time. Just at the foot of the Downs, too, on the north side, we find a few clan settlements on the edge of the Weald, which must date from the first period of English colonisation. Such are Poynings, Didling, Ditchling, Chillington, and Chiltington. Farther in, however, the clan names grow rarer; and where we find them they are not _hams_ or _tuns_, regular communities of Saxon settlers, but they show, by their forestine terminations of _hurst_, _ley_, _den_, and _field_, that they were mere outlying shelters of hunters or swineherds in the trackless forest. Such are Billinghurst, Warminghurst, Itchingfield, and Ardingley. On the Cuckmere river, the villages in the combes bear names like Jevington and Lullington; but in the upper valley of the little stream, where it flows through the Weald, we find instead Chiddingley and Hellingley. Most of the Weald villages, however, bear still more woodland titles--Midhurst, Farnhurst, Nuthurst, Maplehurst, and Lamberhurst; Cuckfield, Mayfield, Rotherfield, Hartfield, Heathfield, and Wivelsfield; Crawley, Cowfold, Loxwood, Linchmere, and Marden. _Hams_ and _tuns_, the sure signs of early English colonisation, are almost wholly lacking; in their place we get abundance of such names as Coneyhurst Common, Water Down Forest, Hayward's Heath, Milland Marsh, and Bell's Oak Green. To this day even, the greater part of the Weald is down in park, copse, heath, forest, common, or marshland. Throughout the whole expanse of the woodland region in Sussex, with the outlying portions in Kent, Surrey, and Hants, Mr. Isaac Taylor has collected no fewer than 299 local names with the significant forest terminations in _hurst_, _den_, _ley_, _holt_, and _field_. These facts show that, during the later 'Anglo-Saxon' period, the Weald was being slowly colonised in a few favourable spots. Its use as a mark was now gone, and it might be safely employed for the peaceful purposes of the archer and the swineherd. Names referring to pasture and the wild beasts are therefore common.

To the same time must doubtless be assigned the exact delimitation of the Sussex frontiers. During the early periods, the Kentings, the Suthrige, and the West Saxons would all extend on their side as far as the Weald, which would be treated as a sort of neutral zone. But when the Woodland itself began to be occupied, a demarcation would naturally be made between the neighbouring provinces. The boundary follows the most obvious course. It starts on the east from the old mouth of the Rother (now diverted to Rye New Harbour), known as the Kent Ditch, in what was then the central and most impassable part of the marshland. It runs along the Rother to its bifurcation, and then makes for the heaven-water-parting or dividing back of the Forest Ridge, beside two or three lesser streams. Then it passes along the crest of the ridge from Tunbridge Wells, past East Grinstead and Crawley, till it strikes the Hampshire border. There it follows the line between the two watersheds to the sea, which it reaches at Emsworth. There is, however, one long insulated spur of Hampshire running down from Haslemere to Graffham (in apparent defiance of geographical features), whose origin and meaning I do not understand.

With the Norman Conquest, the history of Sussex, and of England generally, for the most part ceases abruptly; all the rest is mere personal gossip about Prince Edward and the battle of Lewes, or about George IV. and the Brighton Pavilion. Not, of course, that there is not real national history here as elsewhere; but it is hard to disentangle from the puerile personalities of historians generally. Nevertheless, some brief attempt to reconstruct the main facts in the subsequent history of Sussex must still be undertaken. The part which Sussex bore passively in the actual Conquest is itself typical of the new relations. England was getting drawn into the general run of European civilisation, and the old isolation of Sussex was beginning to be broken down. Lying so near the Continent, Sussex was naturally the landing-place for an army coming from Normandy or Ponthieu. William's fleet came ashore on the low coast at Pevensey. Naturally he turned towards Hastings, whence a road now led through the Weald to London. On the tall cliffs he threw up an earthwork, and then marched towards the great town. Harold's army met him on the heights of Senlac, part of the solitary ridge between the marshes, by which alone London could be reached. Harold fell on the spot now marked by the ruined high altar of Battle Abbey--a national monument at present in the keeping of an English duke. Once the native army was routed, William marched on resistlessly to London, and Sussex and England were at his feet.

The new feudal organisation of the county is doubtless shadowed forth in the existing rapes. Of these there are six, called respectively after Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. It will be noticed at once that these were the seats of the new bishopric and of the five great early castles. In one form or another, more or less modernised, Arundel Castle, Bramber Castle, Lewes Castle, Pevensey Castle, and Hastings Castle all survive to our own day. In accordance with their ordinary policy of removing cathedrals from villages to chief towns, and so concentrating the civil and ecclesiastical government, the Normans brought the bishopstool from Selsea to Chichester. The six rapes are fairly coincident--Chichester with the marsh district; Arundel with the dale of Arun; Bramber with the dale of Adur; Lewes with the western dale of Ouse; Pevensey with the eastern dale of Ouse; and Hastings with the insulated region between the marshes. In other words, Sussex seems to have been cut up into six natural divisions along the sea-shore; while to each division was assigned all the Weald back of its own shore strip as far as the border. Thus the rapes consist of six long longitudinal belts, each with a short sea front and a long stretch back into the Weald.

Increased intercourse with the Continent brought the Cinque Ports into importance; and, as premier Cinque Port, Hastings grew to be one of the chief towns in Sussex. The constant French wars made them prominent in mediæval history. As trade grew up, other commercial harbours gave rise to considerable mercantile towns. Rye and Winchelsea, at the mouth of the Rother, were great ports of entry from France as late as the days of Elizabeth. Seaford, at the mouth of the Ouse, was also an important harbour till 1570, when a terrible storm changed the course of the stream to the town called from that fact Newhaven. Lewes was likewise a port, as the estuary of the Ouse was navigable from the mouth up to the town. Brighthelmstone was still a village; but old Shoreham on the Adur was a considerable place. Arundel Haven and Chichester Harbour recalls the old mercantile importance of their respective neighbourhoods. The only other places of any note in mediæval Sussex were Steyning, under the walls of Bramber Castle; Hurstmonceux, which the Conqueror bestowed upon the lord of Eu; Battle, where he planted his great expiatory abbey; and Hurst Pierpont, which also dates from William's own time. The sole important part of the county was still the strip along the coast between the Weald and the sea.

During the Plantagenet period, England became a wool-exporting country, like Australia at the present day; and therefore the wool-growing parts of the island rose quickly into great importance. Sussex, with its large expanse of chalk downs, naturally formed one of the best wool-producing tracts; and in the reign of Edward III., Chichester was made one of the 'staples' to which the wool trade was confined by statute. Sussex Proper and the Lewes valley were now among the most thickly populated regions of England.

The Weald, too, was beginning to have its turn. English iron was getting to be in request for the cannon, armour, and arms required in the French wars; and nowhere was iron more easily procured, side by side with the fuel for smelting it, than in the Sussex Weald. From the days of the Edwards to the early part of the eighteenth century, the woods of the Weald were cut down in quantities for the iron works. During this time, several small towns began to spring up in the old forest region, of which the chief are Midhurst, Petworth, Billinghurst, Horsham, Cuckfield, and East Grinstead. Many of the deserted smelting-places may still be seen, with their invariable accompaniment of a pond or dam. The wood supply began to fail as early as Elizabeth's reign, but iron was still smelted in 1760. From that time onward, the competition of Sheffield and Birmingham--where iron was prepared by the 'new method' with coal--blew out the Sussex furnaces, and the Weald relapsed once more into a wild heather-clad and wood-covered region, now thickly interspersed with parks and country seats, of which Petworth, Cowdry, and Ashburnham are the best known.

Modern times, of course, have brought their changes. With the northward revolution caused by steam and coal, Sussex, like the rest of southern England, has fallen back to a purely agricultural life. The sea has blocked up the harbours of Rye, Winchelsea, Seaford, and Lewes. Man's hand has drained the marshes of the Rother, of Pevensey, and of Selsea Bill; and railways have broken down the isolation of Sussex from the remainder of the country. Still, as of old, the natural configuration continues to produce its necessary effects. Even now there are no towns of any size in the Weald: few, save Lewes, Arundel, and Chichester, anywhere but on the coast. The Downs are given up to sheep-farming; the Weald to game and pleasure-grounds; the shore to holiday-making. The proximity to London is now the chief cause of Sussex prosperity. In the old coaching days, Brighton was a foregone conclusion. Sixty miles by road from town, it was the nearest accessible spot by the seaside. As soon as people began to think of annual holidays, Brighton must necessarily attract them. Hence George IV. and the Pavilion. The railroad has done more. It has made Brighton into a suburb, and raised its population to over 100,000. At the same time, the South Coast line has begotten watering-places at Worthing, Bognor, and Littlehampton. In the other direction, it has created Eastbourne. Those who do not love chalk (as the Georges did), choose rather the more broken and wooded country round Hastings and St. Leonards, where the Weald sandstone runs down to the sea. The difference between the rounded Downs and saucer-shaped combes of the chalk, and the deep glens traversing the soft friable strata of the Wealden, is well seen in passing from Beachy Head to Ecclesbourne and Fairlight. Shoreham is kept half alive by the Brighton coal trade: Newhaven struggles on as a port for Dieppe. But as a whole, the county is now one vast seaside resort from end to end, so that to-day the flat coasts at Selsea, Pevensey, and Rye, are alone left out in the cold. The iron trade and the wool trade have long since gone north to the coal districts. Brighton and Hastings sum up in themselves all that is vital in the Sussex of 1881.

THE BRONZE AXE.

There is always a certain fascination in beginning a subject at the wrong end and working backward: it has the charm which inevitably attaches to all evil practices; you know you oughtn't, and so you can't resist the temptation to outrage the proprieties and do it. I can't myself resist the temptation of beginning this article where it ought to break off--with Chinese money, which is not the origin, but the final outcome and sole remaining modern representative of that antique and almost prehistoric implement, the Bronze Age hatchet.

Improbable and grotesque as this affiliation sounds at first hearing, it is, nevertheless, about as certain as any other fact in anthropological science--which isn't, perhaps, saying a great deal. The familiar little brass cash, with the square hole for stringing them together on a thread in the centre, well known to the frequenter of minor provincial museums, are, strange to say, the lineal descendants, in unbroken order, of the bronze axe of remote Celestial ancestors. From the regular hatchet to the modern coin one can trace a distinct, if somewhat broken, succession, so that it is impossible to say where the one leaves off and the other begins--where the implement merges into the medium of exchange, and settles down finally into the root of all evil.

Here is how this curious pedigree first worked itself out. In early times, before coin was invented, barter was usually conducted between producer and consumer with metal implements, as it still is in Central Africa at the present day with Venetian glass beads and rolls of red calico. Payments were all made in kind, and bronze was the commonest form of specie. A gentleman desirous of effecting purchases in foreign parts went about the world with a number of bronze axes in his pocket (or its substitute), which he exchanged for other goods with the native traffickers in the country where he did his primitive business. At first, the early Chinese in that unsophisticated age were content to use real hatchets for this commercial purpose; but, after a time, with the profound mercantile instinct of their race, it occurred to some of them that when a man wanted half a hatchet's worth of goods he might as well pay for them with half a hatchet. Still, as it would be a pity to spoil a good working implement by cutting it in two, the worthy Ah Sin ingeniously compromised the matter by making thin hatchets, of the usual size and shape, but far too slender for practical usage. By so doing he invented coin: and, what is more, he invented it far earlier than the rival claimants to that proud distinction, the Lydians, whose electrum staters were first struck in the seventh century, B.C. But, according to Professor Terrien de la Couperie, some of the fancy Chinese hatchets which we still retain date back as far as the year 1000 (a good round number), and are so thin that they could only have been intended to possess exchange value. And when a distinguished Sinologist gives us a date for anything Chinese, it behoves the rest of the unlearned world to open its mouth and shut its eyes, and thankfully receive whatever the distinguished Sinologist may send it.

In the seventh century, then, these mercantile axes, made in the strictest sense to sell and not to use, were stamped with an official stamp to mark their amount, and became thereby converted into true coins--that was the root of the 'root of all evil.' Thence the declension to the 'cash' is easy; the form grew gradually more and more regular, while the square hole in the centre, once used for the handle, was retained by conservatism and practical sense as a convenient means of stringing them together.

So this was the end of the old bronze hatchet, perhaps the most wonderful civilizing agent ever invented by human ingenuity. Let us hark back now, and from the opposite side see what was its first beginning.

'But why,' you ask, 'the most wonderful civilizing agency? What did the bronze axe ever do for humanity?' Well, nearly everything. I believe I have really not said too much. We are apt to talk big nowadays about the steam-engine, and that marvellous electricity which is always going to do wonders for us all--to-morrow; but I don't know whether either ever produced so great a revolution in human life, or so completely metamorphosed human existence, as that simple and commonplace bronze hatchet.

For, consider that before the days of bronze man knew no weapon or implement of any sort save the stone axe, or tomahawk, and the flint-tipped arrow. Consider, that the highest stage of human culture he had then reached was hardly higher than that of the scalp-hunting Red Indian or the seal-spearing Esquimaux. Consider, that in his Stone Age agriculture and grains were almost unknown--the forest uncleared, the soil untilled, and hunting and fishing the sole or principal human activities. It was the bronze axe that first enabled man to make clearings in the woodland on the large scale, and to sow on those clearings in good big fields the wheat and barley which determined the first great upward step in the drama of civilization. All these things depend in ultimate analysis upon that pioneer of culture, the bronze hatchet.

And how did the first Watt or Edison of metallurgy come to make that earliest bronze implement? Well, it seems probable that between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age there intervened everywhere, or nearly everywhere, a very short and transient age of copper. And the reason for thus thinking is threefold. In the first place, bronze is an alloy of tin and copper: and it seems natural to suppose that men would use the simple metals in isolation to begin with, before they discovered that they could harden and temper them by mixing the two together. In the second place, copper occurs in the pure or native state (without the trouble of smelting) in several countries, and was therefore a very natural metal for early man to cast his inquiring glance upon. And in the third place, weapons of unmixed copper, apparently of very antique types, have been found in various parts of the world, both in Asia and America. According to Mr. John Evans, the most learned historian of the Bronze Age, the greatest copper 'find' of the eastern hemisphere was that at Gungeria, in Central India; and the copper implements there found consisted entirely of flat celts of a very early and almost primitive pattern.

The copper weapons of America, however, have greater illustrative and ethnological interest, because the noble red man, at the period when Columbus first discovered him, and when he first discovered Columbus, was still in the Stone Age of his very imperfect culture, or, to speak more correctly, of extreme barbarism. The fact is, the Indians of Lake Superior were only just beginning to employ copper, and were on the eve of independently inaugurating a Bronze Age of their own, when the intrusive white man came and spoiled the fun by the incontinent introduction of iron, firearms, missionaries, whisky, and all the other resources of civilization. On the shores of Lake Superior native copper exists in abundance; and the intelligent Red Indian, finding this handsome red stone in the cliffs by his side, was pretty sure to try his hand at chipping a tomahawk out of the rare material. But, as soon as he did so, Mr. Evans suggests, he would find to his surprise that it yielded to his blows; in short, that he had got that singular phenomenon, a malleable stone, to deal with. Hammering away at his new invention, he must shortly have hammered it into a shapely axe. The new process took his practical fancy at once: vistas of an untold wealth of scalps floated gaily before his fevered brain; and he proceeded to hammer himself various weapons and implements without delay. Amongst others, he produced for himself very neat spear-heads, with sockets adapted for the reception of a shaft, made by hammering out the base flat, and then turning over the edges so as to enclose the wood between them, like a modern hoe-handle. In Wisconsin alone more than a hundred of such copper axes, spear-heads, and knives have been unearthed by antiquaries and duly recorded.

All these weapons, however, are simply hammered, not cast or melted. The Red Indian hadn't yet reached the stage of making a mould when De Champlain and his _voyageurs_ came down upon Canada and interrupted this interesting experiment in industrial development by springing the seventeenth century upon the unsophisticated red man at one fell blow, with all its inherited wealth of European science. Nevertheless, the Indians must have known that fire melted copper; for the heat of the altars was great enough, say Squier and Davis, to fuse the implements and ornaments laid upon them in sacrificial rites; and so the fact of its fusibility could hardly have escaped them. A people who had advanced so far on the road towards the invention of casting could hardly have been prevented from taking the final step, save by the sudden intervention of some social cataclysm like the European invasion of Eastern America. And how awful a calamity that was for the Indians themselves we at this day can hardly even realize.

In some similar way, no doubt, the Asiatic people who first invented bronze must have learned the fact of the fusibility of metals, and have applied it in time, at first, perhaps, by accident, to the manufacture of that hard alloy. I say Asiatic, because there seems good reason to believe that Asia was the original home of the nascent bronze industry. For a Bronze Age almost necessarily implies a brief preceding age of copper; and there is no proof of pure copper implements ever having been largely used in Europe, while there is ample proof of their having been used to a very considerable extent in Asia. Hence we may reasonably infer that the art of bronze-making was developed in Asia by a copper-using people, and that when metallurgy was first introduced into Europe the method of mixing the copper with tin had already been perfected. The abundance of tin in the south-eastern islands of Asia renders this view probable; while in Europe there are no tin mines worth mentioning, except in the remotest part of a remote outlying island--to wit, in Cornwall.

Be this as it may, the earliest and simplest forms of bronze axe with which we are acquainted are profoundly interesting, as casting a flood of light upon the general process of human evolution all the world over. Every new human invention is always at first directly modelled upon the other similar products which have preceded it. There is no really new thing under the sun. For example, the earliest English railway carriages were built on the model of the old stage-coach, only that three stage-coaches, as it were, were telescoped together, side by side--the very first bore the significant motto, _Tria juncta in uno_--and it was this preconception of the English coachbuilder that has hampered us ever since with our hateful 'compartments,' instead of the commodious and comfortable open American saloon carriages. So, too, the earliest firearms were modelled on the stock of the old cross-bow, and the earliest earthenware pots and pans were shaped like the still more primitive gourds and calabashes. It need not surprise us, therefore, to find that the earliest metal axes of which we have any knowledge were directly moulded on the original shape of the stone tomahawk.

Such a copper hatchet, cast in a mould formed by a polished neolithic stone celt, was found in an early Etruscan tomb, and is still preserved in the Museum at Berlin. See how natural this process would be. For, in the first place, the primitive workman, knowing already only one form of axe, the stone tomahawk, would naturally reproduce it in the new material, without thinking what improvements in shape and design the malleability and fusibility of the metal would render possible or easy. But, more than that, the idea of coating the polished stone axe with plastic clay, and thereby making a mould for the molten metal, would be so very simple that even the neolithic savage, already accustomed to the manufacture of coarse pottery upon natural shapes, could hardly fail to think of it. As a matter of fact, he did think of it: for celts of bronze or copper, cast in moulds made from stone hatchets, have been found in Cyprus by General di Cesnola, on the site of Troy by Dr. Schliemann, and in many other assorted localities by less distinguished but equally trustworthy archæologists.

To the neolithic hunter, herdsman, and villager this progress from the stone to the metal axe probably seemed at first a mere substitution of an easier for a more difficult material. He little knew whither his discovery tended. It was pure human laziness that urged the change. How nice to save yourself all that long trouble of chipping and polishing, with ceaseless toil, in favour of a stone which you could melt at one go and pour while hot into a ready-made mould! It must have looked, by comparison, like weapon-making by magic; for properly to cut and polish a stone axe is the work of weeks and weeks of elbow-grease. Yet here, in a moment, a better hatchet could be turned out all finished! But the implied effects lay deeper far than the neolithic hunter could ever have imagined. The bronze axe was the beginning of civilization; it brought the steam-engine, the telephone, woman's rights, and the county councillor directly in its train. With the eye of faith, had he only possessed that useful optical organ, the Stone Age artizan might doubtless have beheld Pears' soap and the deceased wife's sister looming dimly in the remote future. Till that moment human life had been almost stationary: thenceforth, it proceeded by leaps and bounds, like a kangaroo society, on its upward path towards triumphant democracy and the penny post. The nineteenth century and all its wiles hung by a thread upon the success of his melting pot.

Indeed, the whole history of human civilization has been one of a constantly accelerated progress. The Older Stone Age, when men knew only how to chip flint implements, but hadn't yet invented the art of grinding and polishing them, was one of immense and incalculable duration, to be reckoned perhaps by tens of thousands of years--some bold chronologists would even suggest by hundreds of thousands. Improvement there was, to be sure, during all that long epoch of slow development; but it was improvement at a snail's pace. The very rude chipped axes of the naked drift age give way after thousands and thousands of years to the shapelier chipped lances, javelins, and arrowheads of the skin-clad cavemen. M. Gabriel de Mortillet, indeed, most indefatigable of theorists, has even pointed out four stages of culture, marked by four different types of weapons, into which he subdivides the Older Stone Age. Yet vast epochs elapsed before some prehistoric Stephenson or dusky Morse first, half by accident, smote out the idea of grinding his tomahawk smooth to a sharp cutting edge, instead of merely chipping it sharp, and so initiated the Neolithic Period. This Neolithic Period itself, again, was immensely long as compared with the Bronze Age which followed, though short by comparison with the Palæolithic epoch which preceded it. Then the Bronze Age saw enormous changes come faster and faster, till the use of iron still further accelerated the rate of progress. For each new improvement becomes, in turn, the parent of yet newer triumphs, so that at last, as in the present day, a single century sees vaster changes in the world of man than whole ages before it have done in far longer intervals.

But the invention of bronze, or, in other words, the introduction of hard metal, was really perhaps the very greatest epoch of all, the most distinct turning-point in the whole history of humanity. True, some beginnings of civilisation were already found in the Newer Stone Age. Man did not then live by slaughter alone. Hand-made pottery and rude tissues of flax are found in neolithic lake dwellings in Switzerland. Agriculture was already practised in a feeble way on small open clearings, cautiously cleaved with fire or hewn with the tomahawk in the native forests. The cow, the sheep, and the goat were more or less domesticated, though the horse was yet riderless; and the pastoral had therefore, to some extent, superseded the pure hunting stage. But what inroad could the stone hatchet make unaided upon the virgin forests of those remote days? The neolithic clearing must have been a mere stray oasis in a desert of woodland, like the villages of the New Guinea savages at the present day, lying few and far between among vast stretches of primæval forest.