Chapter II: Part I: The Physical Nature of the County

The English counties differ in two ways from the divisions into which other European countries have fallen: in the first place, they are somewhat smaller than the average division, natural or artificial, of other countries; and in the second place, they have in many cases a more highly-specialised life. Both these features have been of great value in building up the history of England, and, before one sets out to understand any county, it is always worth one’s while to remember them and to appreciate their importance in our national development.

The strong local character of counties is more discoverable in some than in others. Thus Cheshire with its distinctive plain; Cornwall with its peculiar racial and, till recently, linguistic features; Devon, all grouped round one great lump of hills, almost make little nations by themselves. Again, those who are acquainted with the north of England will mark the quite separate character which Durham contrasts against Yorkshire on the south and Northumberland upon the north. There are other districts where several counties group themselves together, and where the whole group differs more from the rest of England than do the separate counties of the group one from another. This is particularly the case with East Anglia, and to some extent it is the case with the Shires.

When (to return to the case of particular counties) some strong local differential is discoverable it can nearly always be traced to a combination of historical and topographical causes. It is our business to examine these first in an appreciation of the county of Sussex.

Sussex was created from the sea. Its inhabitants and its invaders at all periods, save perhaps in the height of the Roman prosperity, and again during the last hundred and fifty years, have had a difficulty in going northward, because there spread north of the most habitable region the long belt of what is called the Weald. Sussex is, in a word, a great range of hills along the south coast inhabited upon either slope and upon either plain

at either base, but cut off from the Thames valley by a soil long uncultivated and more suited to forest than to habitation.

[Sidenote: THE HARBOURS]

From the coast side it presents a number of clearly-defined harbours, from which it has evidently been colonised, and from which we know it to have been invaded; these harbours are the mouths of its small, parallel, characteristic rivers--the Arun, the Adur, the Ouse, the Cuckmere, and the Rother. Of natural harbours other than the mouths of the rivers it now has none, though it is probable that in the remote past plains, which are now dry land guarded by small elevations (as for example, Pevensey and Winchelsea), formed natural harbours afterwards artificially developed. These harbours are small for our modern scale of shipping, and the strong tide that runs in them is rather a disadvantage than otherwise for those who use them to-day. But in early times such tides were nothing but an advantage, and the smaller draft and beam of the shipping found ample accommodation in the river mouths. It is also to be noted that these river mouths stood at fairly even distances one from the other. There is not in the whole length of the coast of England, from the South Foreland to Penzance, a strip of coast so exactly divided by refuges set at regular distances into which small craft can run. Moreover, Sussex also provides a multitude of those even, sloping, and safe beaches which were of such immense importance to early navigators, with whom the beaching of a whole fleet was among the commonest ways of effecting a landing. The typical Sussex example of this early advantage and of a town springing around it is, of course, to be discovered at Hastings.

It may next be inquired what limits eastward and westward existed to form natural boundaries for the county. This is a point of great interest which has been but little examined, but which a consideration of the geography of Sussex should make sufficiently plain. The early settlements along the river mouths were grouped together in one countryside by the comparative facility of communication along the sea-plain, and again by the comparative facility of communication along the well-watered belt to the north of the Downs. It may be imagined that the settlements around the harbours of the Ouse, of the Arun, and of the Adur, would, from the earliest times, have been in touch with each other along the flat of the coast, and that their extensions along the river valleys to

the north of the hills, as also the separate harbour at the mouth of the Rother, would equally have been in communication by that ancient track most of which subsists to this day, and of which further mention will be made later on in these pages. But, when the primitive inhabitant attempted a similar communication eastward into what is now Kent, or westward with what is now Hampshire, his way was barred by two great tongues of marsh.

[Sidenote: THE MARSHES]

Traces of these marshes still exist after two thousand years of cultivation, and in the very earliest times they must have presented a most formidable obstacle to travel. The one group which lies to the east of the valley of the Rother is still in part undrained; the other, which forms a mass of tidal creeks and inlets round about Hayling Island, Bosham, and Chichester harbour, is almost equally difficult. These two, then, set the limits of the county; for marsh is, of all obstacles, the most considerable at the beginning of a civilisation, as it is the least remembered in the height of one. It cannot be forded as can a stream, nor swum nor sailed upon; mere effort, such as that required for the climbing of mountains, is of no avail against it, and, whereas some considerable toil _will_ clear a track through a forest, and a track which, in our climate at least, can be maintained, once it is formed, with little labour, no such effort is of avail to primitive man in attempting to cross a morass. To drain it is quite beyond his power, and the formation of a causeway of hard land is, even in our own day, a most expensive and long process, as those readers who are acquainted with the history of our engineering will remember when they recall the building of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway across Chat Moss.

It may be remarked in passing that there are scattered up and down England many examples of the difficulties which Fenland and bog present to an imperfect civilisation, and these are to be found in the “Stretfords,” “Stratfords,” “Standfords,” etc., which invariably mark a place where a hard Roman road was conducted across a river and its adjoining wet lands. In such places the straight line of the old Roman road can usually be traced, and one can also usually see how the modern road follows a devious track given to it after the decline of the Roman civilisation, when the imperial ways had been allowed to decay, and the half-barbarian traveller of the Dark Ages picked his way as best he could from one dry patch to another. These

deviations of the modern from the Roman lines across rivers and marshes in England are one of the most striking evidences of the gulf into which civilisation sank after the advent of the Saxon pirates.

[Sidenote: DATE OF TOWNS]

Sussex, then, has been naturally delimited in its growth by the forest of the Weald all along the north, and by these two groups of marshes at the extreme east and west of the county; and the older our record the greater importance assumed by towns within reach of, or upon, the sea. Thus Midhurst, Petworth, Pulboro, Horsham, Mayfield, Battle, come all of them comparatively late in the history of the development of the county. Chichester, Arundel, Lewes, Hastings, Pevensey, come early in that development, and so does Bramber with its harbour of Old Shoreham. Pevensey and Chichester are associated with a Roman name; Bramber, or rather its neighbour Shoreham, and Pevensey (again) with the first of the Saxon invasions. Arundel with the reign of King Alfred; Hastings and (for the third time) Pevensey with the Norman invasion; whereas the other towns that lie in a belt northward upon the edge of the Weald are not heard of till the Middle Ages.

The present boundaries of the county are necessarily somewhat artificial, though they conform fairly closely to the natural features which we have just been considering. Their artificiality is most easily seen along the north. The true line of division should run along the ridge of the forests: St Leonards and Ashdown.

As a fact, political and organised Sussex overlaps this ridge and takes in part of what is geographically Surrey upon the north. The reason of this is that during many centuries the Weald was so sparsely inhabited that the Surrey villages under the North Downs, and the Sussex villages under the South Downs, thrust out long extensions into the forest, a custom which gave to those parishes a most peculiar shape. They were drawn into strips, as it were, whose inhabitants dwelt clustered at one end of the elongated band. A phenomenon of much the same kind is to be discovered along the St. Lawrence in Canada, where each village clustered upon the river claims a long strip of hinterland behind it into the forest of the north.

The line of division between these Surrey parishes, which stretched out southwards into the forest and these Sussex villages which stretched out northward to meet them, was probably never clearly defined, and was, indeed, of little importance. The

[Sidenote: PARISHES OF WEALD]

farther one got from the village church and the group of houses, the less it mattered under whose jurisdiction one fell, and when, with the growth of civilisation and the necessity for exact boundaries, a line was at last drawn, it was drawn somewhat in favour of the Sussex parishes, whose manorial lords were of greater political importance than those of Surrey: for the reason that they held the great castles which defended the south of England. It was, presumably, in this way that the ribbon of land which lies to the north of the forest ridge came to be included within the political boundaries of the modern county.

Viewed in the light of such a development from the sea, the topography of Sussex falls into a comparatively simple scheme.

The whole county is determined by the great line of chalk hills which stand steep up against the Weald, that is, with their escarpment facing northward, and which slope gradually towards the sea plain upon the south in such a fashion, that a section taken anywhere in that range resembles in form a wave driven forward by the south-west wind and just about to break over the Weald. It is not the least of the unities which render Sussex so harmonious that this main range of the South Downs, which are the strong framework of the whole county, should have all the appearance of being blown forward into its shape by those Atlantic gales which also determine the configuration of the trees in the sea-plain and upon the slopes of the hills.

Were this range of the South Downs to run parallel to the sea throughout the length of the county the topographical scheme of which we are speaking could be set forth in very few words. The whole county would fall at once and without qualification into four long parallel belts: the sea-plain, the Downs next inland to it, the belt of old villages at the foot of the Downs to the north (that is, the southern edge of the Weald), and the forest ridge to the north of the whole. As a fact, however, these lines, though parallel to one another, are not strictly parallel to the sea coast; they tilt somewhat from the north-west to the south-east, so that the plan of the county resembles a piece of stuff woven in four broad bands which have been cut in bias, or, as the phrase goes, “on the cross.” Each belt has, therefore, its termination on the sea. The coastal plain gets narrower and narrower, and comes to an end at Brighton; the Chalk Downs run into the sea just beyond this point, and are cut off, in sharp white cliffs all along Seaford Bay, in a

face of white precipice which culminates at Beachy Head. The southern Weald and the flats, which run all across the county just north of the Downs, come to the sea in that great even stretch between Eastbourne and Hastings for which the general name is Pevensey Level; and, finally, the somewhat complicated and diversified forest ridge, with its mixture of clay and sand, runs into the sea in the neighbourhood of Hastings.

[Sidenote: THE FOUR BELTS]

These four great belts may be traced, not only in the relief of the county, but also in its superficial geology; the sea plain is throughout of a deep, strong, brown loamy soil, among the most fertile in England, and fetching by far the highest rents paid anywhere in the county. In the best of its stretch, between Chichester and Worthing, it is from four to six miles broad, closely inhabited and, though recently marred by the growth of a whole string of watering-places, still preserving a very characteristic life of its own. Except Chichester no town of any antiquity stands upon it, but it nourishes a great number of prosperous agricultural villages, the size and the architecture of whose churches are sufficient to prove their economic condition in the past.

Among the most characteristic of these is Yapton, which is supposed to be the “tun” or hamlet of Eappa--a comrade of St. Wilfred’s, the missionary and the first bishop of the county. Lyminster is another excellent example of what these places were in the past, and its great church is the more striking from the decay of the parish around it.

The forest ridge (to take the farther boundary first) has, though somewhat confused, a geological characteristic of its own, for it consists of sand rising from and mixed with the clay of the Weald. This clay, in its turn, lying between the forest ridge and the Downs, though diversified by occasional outcrops of sand, is fairly uniform. From the beginning it has been covered, not very thickly, but very generally, with those short, strong oaks which have furnished the timber for all the old buildings of the county. We will turn later to the question of whether this stiff and somewhat ungrateful soil of the Weald was ever wholly uninhabited: in this initial survey it must suffice to remark that even to-day the development of that soil is difficult. Places specially favoured with good water have been occupied for centuries, and form at the present time the market towns of the Weald. The spaces between them are remarkable

[Sidenote: WATER ON THE WEALD]

for the isolation of their farmhouses, and to-day for the way in which the Londoner is discovering to his cost the stubborn nature of the county. Modern invention, and especially the invention of the motor car, has made this situation tempting enough to townsmen, but the new buildings which they attempt to found upon places whose desertion is incomprehensible to them are met with continual difficulties. The water is often bad, the soil much damper in winter than the summer promised--for these experiments are nearly always the result of a first view taken in the height of summer. The long, and often futile, digging for good water, the cost of pumping it when, if ever, it is found, combine to make the new attempts at building on the clay of the Weald grow slacker as time proceeds. There are, however, more grateful opportunities scattered here and there in those outcrops of sand and gravel of which I have spoken. Haywards Heath has grown up in this way, and there are a multitude of villages half-way between the forest ridge and the Downs which owe the greater part of their beauty to the sharp contours of the sandstone.

These outcrops have formed centres of population from the very earliest times, as, for example, at Burton, Egdean, Thakeham, Ashington, and in many other places.

This belt of clay interspersed with occasional heights of sand, and lying between the forest ridge and the Downs, is the broadest of the four; it is rarely less than ten miles in width and often as much as fifteen. Just between it and the escarpment of the Downs runs a narrow belt of green-sand, and again, right under the hills, a narrow belt of loam, which last affords almost the best arable land in this part of the county. It is this narrow belt of loam which has given their value to a procession of famous estates under the shadow of the hills, as Heyshott, where was Cobden’s Farm; Graffham; Lavington, which was Sargent land, and of which Wilberforce and Manning were in turn the squires; Burton, which was the first to appear in history; West Burton; Bignor, which the Romans developed; Bury, upon the Arun. To some extent Parrham, the most typical of Sussex houses, and Wistons, the best example of the renaissance, draw their wealth from this narrow belt of loam, as, farther east, does New Timber, and many another great house. The list might be extended indefinitely.

This long stretch under the escarpment of the

[Sidenote: THE BRITISH TRACK]

Downs contains, perhaps, the oldest remaining monument of man’s activity in the county: all the way from Heyshott to Ditchling Beacon, and, as it is claimed, even right on to Lewes, there runs what is evidently a prehistoric trackway. Its antiquity is proved by many indications, but chiefly by this, that it has sunk deep, even into the hardest soils. There is a point near Sutton, under Cold Harbour Hill, where it is perhaps twelve feet below the general level of the soil, and there are many places where it is over six. This old way, which is utilised almost throughout the whole of its length by modern lanes, links up centres of population which are as old, one must imagine, as the existence of mankind in this island. Their names are those which we have just seen in connection with the great estates to which these villages belong--Lavington, Bignor, Bury, Amberley, Storrington, Washington, Steyning, Bramber, Povnings, Fulcking, and so on eastwards to Lewes.

It was not only the fertility of the loam, nor only the proximity of the Weald for a hunting-ground, that produced these little prehistoric villages, but also the excellent supply of water.

Sussex is, perhaps, of all the English counties that one in which it is most difficult to find good water, as we have already seen in speaking of the Weald, and as we shall see further when we come to talk of the Chalk Downs. But these little villages, standing as they do just upon the crack where the chalk (which is permeable and full of water like a sponge) comes sharp on to the impermeable soil of the Weald, are all fed by a multitude of delicious running streams filtered through hundreds of feet of the pure carbon of the hills and bursting out along the old road. They turn mills, they water orchards and small closes, they spread into teeming fish-ponds, and have, more than any other cause, created these little villages. There is hardly one without its stream.

Having reviewed these three belts--the coast-plain, the forest ridge, and the southern belt of the Weald--it remains for us to describe that which is by far the most important, namely, the South Downs. It will be necessary to devote to those hills a closer attention than we have given to the rest of the county, for one may call them, without much exaggeration, the county itself. Sussex is Sussex on account of the South Downs. Their peculiar landscape, their soil, their uniformity, give the county all its meaning.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: THE CHALK-RANGES]

The principal hill ranges of South England, the Chilterns, the Cotswold, the Mendips, the North and South Downs, the Dorset Downs, and the Berkshire Downs, roughly converge upon Salisbury Plain. Of the importance of that site in the history of our island there is no space to speak here, but it is necessary to remember the disposition of the ranges in order to appreciate how great a rôle the South Downs must have played in the early history of Britain; for they furnished, as did the other three great chalk ranges (the Dorset Downs, the North Downs, and the Chilterns, with their continuation in the Berkshire Downs), the main routes of travel in early times. They were bare of trees, dry, and fairly even along their summits, and, save in a few places, they afforded a good view upon either side, so that the traveller could in primitive times beware of the approach of enemies.

The great mass of chalk which forms the Hampshire Highland splits, before the eastern boundary of that county is reached, into two branches; the northern one of these runs through Surrey, straight to the Medway in Kent, crosses that river, and turns down to meet the sea at Dover. The southern branch enters the county of Sussex just beyond Petersfield, and thence eastward forms this range of the South Downs.

There is no other stretch of hills precisely like them in Europe; their nearest counterpart is that other northern range formed much upon the same model, and of the same material, which looks at them from thirty miles away across the Weald. They run in one straight wall for sixty miles, maintaining throughout that length a similar conformation with a similar escarpment turned perpetually to the north; a similar absence of water; a similar presence from place to place of groups of beech-trees which occasionally crown their highest summits; a similar succession of comparatively low passes, and a similar though rarer series of what the people of the county call “gaps,” that is, gorges, or rather rounded clefts, in which their continuity is completely broken by the passage of a river. They are the most uniform, the most striking, and the most individual of all the lower ranges to be discovered in this island or in neighbouring countries. They might be compared by a traveller to the line of the Argonne, or to the steep, even hills above the Moselle before it enters German territory. But they are more of one kind than are even these united ranges. Coming upon

[Sidenote: NATURE OF SOUTH DOWNS]

them from the north, as so many do now, motoring and bicycling south from London, their steep, sharp face showing black with the daylight behind it, is the principal feature of the south-east of England.

Their contours depend, of course, upon the chalk of which they are built. This lies in regular layers five, six, and sometimes eight hundred feet deep from their summits to the level of the plain beneath them. It is weathered into rounded shapes that have no peaks and no precipices, or at least no precipices save those which man has deliberately created, where he has dug straight out of their sides for chalk, or where they meet the sea and are washed into perpendicular cliffs. These rounded lines of theirs against the sky, when one is travelling along them, seem in some way to add to their loneliness, and that loneliness is among the most striking of their features.

They have never been built upon; it is to be believed (and profoundly to be hoped) they never will be built upon. The depth to which wells have to be sunk before water can be found is so great as to check any experiment of this kind. There is in the whole skyline, from Petersfield right to Beachy Head, not a single human habitation to break the noble aspect of these hills against the sky save one offensive shed, or what not, just north of Brighton where, it may be presumed, the economic powers of vulgarism are too strong even for the Downs.

Cultivation is also very rare upon them. They are covered with a short, dense, and very sweet turf suited to the famous flocks of sheep which browse upon them, and of little value for any other agricultural purpose than the pasturage thus afforded.

Those who best know the Downs and have lived among them all their lives can testify how, for a whole day’s march, one may never meet a man’s face; or if one meets it, it will be the face of some shepherd who may be standing lonely with his dog beside him upon the flank of the green hill and with his flock scattered all around. The isolation of these summits is the more remarkable from the pressure of population which is growing so rapidly to the south of them, and which is beginning to threaten the Weald to their north. But no modern change seems to affect the character of these lonely stretches of grass, and it may be noted with satisfaction that, when those ignorant of the nature of Sussex attempt to violate the security of the Downs, that experiment of theirs is commonly attended with misfortune.

[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX RIVERS]

Thus an open space of park-land beyond Madehurst invited the eye of a very wealthy man (presumably from the north) somewhat more than a century ago. He had not, indeed, the folly to build upon the crest of the hills, but he built not far from their summits for the pleasure that the view afforded him. The house was large and pretentious. To this day it depends for its water upon chance rains, and in the drought it pays for water as one may have to do for any other valuable thing.

We have seen that the unison of the Downs is broken by a certain number of regular gaps--the valleys, that is, of the Wealden rivers. For the rivers of Sussex, by an accident which geologists have attempted to explain, are not determined by the rise of these great hills, but on the contrary cut right through them from the Weald to the sea. The Arun, from the Wealden town of Pulborough to its seaport of Littlehampton, the little Adur from various sources round by Shipley and Cuckfield to its harbour town of Shoreham, the Ouse from the Wealden town of Uckfield to its harbour town of Newhaven, all cut right through the chalk hills and form narrow, level valleys of alluvial soil between one section of the Downs and the next.

These valleys where they cut through the Downs were never used for roads before modern times. The good road along the little Adur to Shoreham is fairly old, but it must be remembered that at this point the Downs come very close to the sea. Along the Ouse and along the Arun no road was attempted until quite lately. There does now exist, and perhaps has existed for two or three hundred years past, a road from Lewes to the mouth of the Ouse, but even to-day there is none along the Arun valley. The soil was too marshy for such a road to be constructed in early times, and the dry hill-way once fixed and metalled has become the only permanent road to Arundel.

The afforesting of the range of the Downs is worthy of remark. The woods are of two kinds--those that crown the foot-hills towards the sea and here and there the high slopes of the Downs themselves, and those that have caught on to the slight alluvial drift of the hollows. In both cases they are principally of beech, while in the open around them, along the old tracks and clinging to the crest of the escarpments, are lines of very ancient and somewhat stunted yews. In both cases, whether over the round of the hills or in their hollows, the Sussex woods are somewhat limited in extent and fairly clear of undergrowth. Through all the forest

[Sidenote: THE BEECH AND THE YEW]

known as the Nore Wood a man can ride his horse in pretty well any direction without following a path; the same is true of Houghton Forest and of the other large woods of the Downs. This ease they owe to two things: first, the character of the beech-trees, which forms under its branches a thick bed of mast, out of which but few spears of greenery will show; and, secondly, that quality of the chalk by which (to the salvation of Sussex!) it is but slightly fertile, and by which it therefore preserves itself intact from the invasion of man. Indeed, it is remarkable that the two trees of the Downs, the yew and the beech, both make for a clear soil, and there is a proverb in those parts--

Under the Beech and th’ Yow
Nowt’ll grow.

The valleys of the Downs differ very much according to whether they are upon the south or upon the north of the range. Those to the south are valleys of erosion, shallow, broad, and funnel-shaped, with their wide mouths opening towards the sea and the south-west wind. They are usually called _Stenes_,--a word which is sometimes spelt “_Steine_,”--the best known of which hollows is the valley running through Brighton. There are any number between that point and Goodwood. In their lower parts they support farmhouses, and occasionally they carry one of the great roads which cross the Downs from the north. They are wind-swept, and hold the snow very late; but in summer they are among the most sheltered corners of South England.

Upon the north the steep escarpment of the hills forbids any such conformation. Here the valleys take the shape of very steep hollows of a horseshoe outline known as _combes_, a Celtic word, and frequently hung with deep woods which are known both here and in Kent (and in other parts of the south country) as _hangers_. The most sombre and the most silent of these are perhaps those of Burton, Lavington, and Bury.

The woods upon the slopes, the foot-hills, and the summits are of a different order. Those upon the actual crests are commonly artificial, and are known as “clumps” or “rings.” The Dukes of Richmond have planted a few such near Goodwood, but the most famous is the great landmark of Chanctonbury Ring, above Wiston, which is a resting-point for the eye not only up and down forty miles of the Channel, but also up and down forty miles of the opposing northern range. The woods of the foot-hills and of the slopes are, on the

[Sidenote: DEW PANS]

contrary, primeval--as can be proved from the absence beneath them of Roman or prehistoric remains.

It has already been remarked that the hydrographical system of the South Downs is a peculiar one, that the rivers of Sussex are in no way determined as to their courses by that range of hills, and that the heights themselves are devoid of water, because all that falls upon them percolates through the chalk and does not spring out again until it finds the clay at their base. But there is upon the Downs a traditional method of water-getting handed down, perhaps, from prehistoric times when the camps of refuge, of which we shall speak in a moment, were hard put to it to water their garrisons. This method is the formation of dew pans. A space is hollowed out, preferably towards the summit of a hill. It is circular and shallow in form, and is coated with some impermeable substance--to-day, usually, with concrete. In a very short time this pan will fill with the dew and the rain, and in such a pond, if its dimensions are sufficiently large, there will but rarely be lack of water after it is once formed. It is true that no great strain is laid upon them, though the present writer does know of one case, outside the boundaries of the county, where a large one has been constructed to supply all the needs of a considerable household.

A further matter which every one who is familiar with them must have remarked upon the Downs, is the presence of numerous earthworks raised apparently for defence, and often of very great size. The classical instances of these and the most perfect examples are upon Mount Caburn and Cissbury, one of the foot-hills towards the sea, upon which research has proved that the prehistoric, the Roman, and the barbarian pirate inhabitants have lived in succession. Here was discovered that regular manufactory of flint instruments which is among the most curious prizes of modern prehistoric research, and here also Roman and Saxon ornaments have been found succeeding those of the neolithic men.

But though Cissbury is the most perfect, it is but one of very many similar camps. There is hardly one of the greater summits of the Downs that does not bear traces of these enclosures, and upon some of the hills, notably east of Ambery and again east of Bramber, they are as perfect as they are enormous. There can be little doubt that they were created for the purposes of defence, and the late General Pitt-Rivers conducted an

[Sidenote: THE TUMULI]

exhaustive inquiry into the number of men that would be required to garrison them, upon their structure, positions, and numbers in this and other countries. But the historical, or rather prehistoric problem which they present does not end with the discovery of their original use, for it is difficult to understand, first, where the multitudes can have come from which sufficed to man such considerable embankments; and, secondly, where provision, and above all water, can have been found for such garrisons; for though, as we have seen, the dew pans will always furnish water in certain amounts, they would never have sufficed for the large numbers which alone could hold from half-a-mile to a mile of rampart and ditch.

Associated with these old camps are the tumuli to be found throughout the whole length of the Downs, especially upon their main ridge. But the reader who is interested in such things must be warned against accepting too uncritically the evidence of the Ordnance Survey upon this matter. In the majority of cases it is right, especially with regard to the very interesting group of tombs just beyond the kennels at Upwaltham, above the Chichester road where it crosses the Downs at Duncton Hill; but there is at least one case, and there are probably others, where the heaps of material accumulated in the making of the roads have been erroneously ascribed to our prehistoric ancestors, and, if the present writer is not mistaken, there is an error of this kind marked upon the map close to the new London road which climbs Bury Hill on its way to cross the Downs at Whiteways Lodge.

The complete isolation of these heights, their loneliness, and their wild charm, is enhanced by a line of towns and of villages especially dependent upon them and standing at their feet towards the south. The northern line of villages which lies just under their escarpment on the edge of the Weald, which we have described as being probably prehistoric sites, and which are connected by what has certainly been a prehistoric road, are not directly made by or dependent upon the Downs themselves. Their farmers are not usually large sheep farmers; their shepherds are few; their lives and their industries are those of the plain; their building materials are oak and plaster; their inhabitants but rarely climb the very steep hillsides immediately above them. The villages and towns to the _south_, on the contrary, owe their very existence to the Downs, and show in their every aspect the

[Sidenote: THE SOUTHERN FORT-HILLS]

influence of the range which backs them and by which they live. From these villages proceed the principal flocks of sheep; in one of them, Findon, is the principal sheep fair of the country. Their plough lands are commonly poor, from the admixture of the last slopes of the chalk; their wealth is in flocks and in folds. In the Middle Ages they added to this the pannage which the beech mast of their woods afforded to swine. Right along from the Hampshire border to where the Downs fall into the sea beyond Brighton, from Goodwood that is, through Halnaecker, Eartham, Slindon, Arundel, Angmering, Lancing, to Rottingdeane--or rather to what Rottingdeane used to be before the æsthetes turned it pure Cockney twenty years ago--runs this row of little ancient places which are the typical Sussex homes of all.

They grew up, as did those others of which we have spoken, where water could be found, and also, it may be presumed, where there was some local opportunity for defence now forgotten; the growth of Arundel certainly depended upon these two factors, to some extent probably that of Slindon (which centres round its great pond), and it may be supposed that of Lancing as well.

In their architecture these villages are, as it were, a physical outgrowth of the Downs. The oak, which one sees so commonly in the Weald, is but rarely present here; the roofs are of thatch, the walls of flint.

Flint is, of course, the stone of the chalk, and the supply is unfailing because, by a curious phenomenon which has never been thoroughly explained, no matter how many flints are taken from the surface of the soil, others continue to “sweat up” through the chalk and to take the places of those that have been removed; there is never for very long a lack of surface flints in the fields adjoining these villages. There are some such villages in which every old building without exception, even the squire’s house and the church, are entirely built of flint, as are the boundary walls of the parks and of the farms. The material has, however (at least in the constructions of the last few centuries), one great defect, which is that the mortar does not bind it as strongly as it will bind brick or stone. This defect has been explained as being due to the extremely hard nature of the silex, for to bind material together it is essential that the binding flux, the mortar, should penetrate more or less into the pores of that which it binds, and for this reason brick and stone are

[Sidenote: FLINT-BUILDING]

wetted before being laid upon the mortar. Obviously no wetting can be of the least use where one is dealing with flint. Nevertheless, the old work of the country is singularly enduring. Of this a first-rate example is afforded to the traveller by the one great slab of wall which is all that remains of Bramber Castle. Here is a piece of masonry standing perpendicularly for perhaps fifty feet in height, not particularly thick, made entirely of flint, and yet standing upright in spite of sieges and artillery fire, the destruction of all its supports, and the passage of at least six hundred years.

It would be for an expert to discuss what were the causes of this superior excellence in the older work; but it may be suggested by one who has looked closely into several specimens of mediæval flint-building, that two rules were almost invariably observed by our ancestors before the Reformation. The first was to preserve as carefully as possible the natural casing or “skin” of hardened chalk which surrounds every large flint, and to have none of the smooth stone surface showing except on the outside of the wall. The second was to use nothing but the fine sand which the county affords so plentifully in the mixing of the mortar. It may be, of course, that here, as in so many other cases, the argument applies that we merely imagine the older work to be better because the best of it alone survives, but it is at least remarkable that hardly any flint work of the last three hundred years has come down without some distortion from the perpendicular.

A very marked way of handling this stone is the cutting of the outer surface. This treatment is not peculiar to Sussex; it is to be found in East Anglia and in other parts of England where flints are common, but it is perhaps more general in Sussex than elsewhere, and may have originated in this county. The separate dressing of so many small stones is an expensive matter, and it is probably the very expense which is so incurred, or rather the great expenditure of energy connoted by the appearance of such work, which impresses and is designed to impress the spectator of it. Perhaps the most perfect specimen of a modern sort is the great house at West Deane; but all those who love their county are pleased to remark that in the new work at Arundel Castle this true Sussex style has been observed.

There is but one further point to be remarked with regard to the Downs country, and that is the nature of the communication across the hills.

[Sidenote: THE PASSES]

It has already been said that the main river valleys were not much used for such communications; that there is no case of both sides of one of the river gaps being so used throughout the whole length of the county; and that there is but one case of a road following a river before modern times (the case of the old road from Bramber to Shoreham); while to this day (it will be remembered) the Arun valley is utilised by nothing but the railway.

Crossings from north to south in Sussex, from the Weald to the sea-plain, are therefore invariably carried over the crest of the hills, and it is a matter for some astonishment that in a county so near London, and to reach a district so thickly populated and so wealthy as is the South Coast, the passages should be so few. With the exception of the Falmer Road from Lewes to Brighton (which can hardly be said to cross the main range), there are but five roads leading from the Weald to the sea-plain. The main Brighton Road which goes over Clayton Hill, the Worthing Road over Washington, the Arundel Road over Bury, the Chichester Road over Duncton, and the second Chichester Road over Cocking.

The uniformity of type which distinguishes the Downs causes all these roads to take much the same section: they choose a low saddle in the range (the Arundel Road is something of an exception here, for the saddle of Bury Hill is a high one); they rise up very sharply to the summit and then fall easily away towards the sea-plain; and though Cocking Hill is perhaps the shortest, Bury Hill the longest, of the five, it is an error to attempt, as do many who are insufficiently acquainted with the county, to avoid the steepness of the ascent by taking a detour. All or any one of these roads will try the traveller or the machine which he uses, and it must be remembered that these five are the only roads of any sort which cross the Downs. Many a track marked as crossing them is, when one comes to pursue it, nothing but a “ride” of grass in no way different from the rest of the grass of the Downs. All these roads have, however, one advantage attached to them, which is the astonishing view of the coastal plain which greets one from their summits, especially the view from Whiteways and the sudden and unexpected panorama at Benges, which is the second and highest summit of the Duncton Hill Road.

* * * * *

This topographical division of our subject cannot

[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX RIVERS]

be concluded without a more particular description of the Sussex rivers. Of these the first in importance and the largest is the Arun. It rises in a lake which is little known, and which is yet of great beauty, in St. Leonard’s Forest, runs as a small and very winding stream through Horsham and the northern Wealden parts of the county, and only begins to acquire the importance of a true river in the neighbourhood of Stopham. Here it is crossed by an old bridge which is itself among the most beautiful structures of the county, and which spans the river at one of its broadest and most secluded reaches. It is also the true dividing line between the Upper and the Lower Arun, because it is the extreme limit that the tide has ever reached even under the most favourable circumstances of high springs and drought. Just below Stopham there falls into the Arun a little river called the Rother, or Western Rother, to distinguish it from the Eastern Rother which is the principal stream at the other end of the county. This little river, which was canalised and usable for traffic until, like all the rest of our waterways, it was killed by the railroads, waters a most charming valley strung with towns and villages whose names we have already mentioned in another connection. At its head is the millpond of Midhurst; it runs through the land of Cowdray (which is the great park of Midhurst), past Burton Rough, south of Petworth, where it turns one of its several mills, and on past Coates and Fittleworth, where it runs close to that inn which most English artists know, and the panels of whose coffee-room have been painted in landscapes by such various hands.

When the Rother has thus fallen into the Arun, the two streams uniting run beneath the houses of Pulborough, and under its bridge, of which the reader will hear more when we come to speak of the historical development of the county; for this was the spot at which the great Roman road which united London with the coastal plain crossed the Arun, and the foundations of Pulborough are almost certainly Roman.

From the little hill upon which this town stands one looks south across a great expanse of dead level meadow, flanked with sandy hills of pine, towards the dark line of the Downs. The river turns and makes for these, aiming at the gap which cuts them clean in two just south of Amberley. Often during the year these flats are covered with floods, and as the river is embanked and the entry of water through the meadows can be regulated by sluices,

[Sidenote: ARUNDEL GAP]

the pasturage of these flooded levels is of great value. The stream rolls on, more and more turbid with the advent of the tide, spreads out into the willow thickets of Amberley Wildbrook where there is good shooting of snipe, runs on right under Bury, leaving Amberley Castle upon the left, passes beneath the causeway and the bridge at Houghton, and so enters the Arundel Gap. Here it is completely lonely. There are not even small footpaths by which the villages of this narrow valley can be reached from the north, though their names of “Southstoke” and “Northstoke” indicate an early passage of some sort, for this place-name throughout South England refers to the “staking” by which the passage of a river was made firm. Two new dykes, cutting off long corners, have been dug in the course of this valley, and they take the main stream, while the old river runs in a narrow and sluggish course by a long detour towards Burpham. The main channel, as it now exists, continues to keep to the right hand side of the valley, where it is continually overhung by the deep woods of Arundel Park; and at last, a little below the Blackrabbit Inn, one sees, jutting out like a spur from the bulk of the hills, the great mass of the Castle.

The attitude of Arundel, standing above the river at this point, is hardly to be matched by any of the river towns of England. It stands up on its steep bank looking right down upon the tidal stream and towards the sea. The houses are natural to the place (the hideous new experiments upon the further bank are hidden from the river), and all the roofs are either old or at least consonant to the landscape, while the situation chosen for St. Philip’s Church, and its architecture, happen by an accident that is almost unknown in modern work, to be exactly suited to the landscape of which it forms the crown, and to balance the background of the Castle and the Keep.

Below the bridge at Arundel the Arun becomes a purely maritime river. It runs in a deep tidal channel with salt meadows upon either side, and with a very violent tide of great height scouring between its embankments. There are no buildings directly upon its sides save one poor lonely inn and church at Ford, and in seven miles it reaches the sea at Littlehampton, pouring into the Channel over one of the shallowest and most dangerous bars upon this coast.

The other rivers merit a much briefer attention.

The Adur is but a collection of very small

[Sidenote: THE ADUR]

streams which meet in the water meadows above Henfield, where it becomes a broad ditch; it cannot be called a true river until it is close upon the hill of Bramber within a few miles of the sea. It is, in fact, a sort of miniature Arun, but its effect in history has been almost as great as that of the larger river, as we shall see farther on, for it also has pierced its own gap through the Downs, and this gap has been, like Arundel, from the earliest times one of the avenues of invasion, and therefore one of the strong places for defence. It runs through this gap, past two delightful and almost unknown relics of mediæval England, parishes that have decayed until they are merely small chapels attached to lonely farms (their names are Coombes and Buttolphs), and comes to where its mouth used to be, at old Shoreham, where was a Roman landing-place, and where the Saxons are said first to have landed also. But the river has built up between itself and the sea a great beach of shingle. Its mouth has gone travelling farther and farther down along the coast, and, had not modern work arrested this process, there probably would have happened to Shoreham what has happened to Orford upon the East Coast. For Orford was also once a great mediæval harbour, the mouth of which has drifted farther and farther off and silted up as it travelled.

The Adur will perhaps cut its largest figure in literature from the fact that it has been the occasion of one of the most ridiculous pieces of pedantry which even modern archæology has fallen into. A statement has been made (it has been taken seriously in our universities) that the Adur had no name until about 200 years ago, that the name it now bears was given it by Camden the historian, and that the Sussex peasants took the title of their river humbly from a writer of books, and have continued to use an artificial and foreign word! If anything were required to prove that a contention of this sort was nonsense it would be enough to point out that the word Adur is, like so many of our Sussex names, Celtic in its origin, and means, like so many Celtic names for rivers, “the water”; it is the same as the southern French name Adour.

The third river, the Ouse, also bears a Celtic name. It is somewhat larger than the Adur, but considerably smaller than the Arun. Like the Adur it flows from insignificant streams until it gets to its water meadows near Lewes, and also like the Adur it has cut its gap through the Downs,

[Sidenote: THE OUSE]

and has therefore created a point of high strategical importance in the fortified hill of Lewes. But, unlike the Adur, the maritime portion of its course is of some length, and during these eight miles or so between Lewes and the mouth at Newhaven it rather resembles the lower part of the Arun. It has the same treeless, marshy sides, highly embanked for the formation of water meadows, the same strong, scouring tide, the same violent current, but, luckily for the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway, not the same bar. The entry at Newhaven is particularly easy, the best in the county, and would be fairly easy even without the dredging that is carried on, or the breakwater that defends it from the south-west.

These three rivers between them form the main hydrographical features of the centre of the county; their three harbours standing at almost exactly regular intervals are the sole entries to the west and middle of Sussex; the three gaps in the Downs behind those harbours are the three gates to South England from the sea; the three castles that defend those gaps complete the significance of the series.

The Cuckmere is but a very small stream coming out just beyond Newhaven with Seaford at its mouth, and would be scarcely worth mentioning were it not for the fact that, like its larger sisters, it shows that singular capacity for cutting right down through the chalk hills and making a gap through which it can pass to the sea.

This feature, which is common to the Sussex rivers, is also discovered in the streams which cross the northern chalk range into the Thames valley. These also are three in number--the Wey, the Mole, and the Darent. And it is conjectured by scientists that these three rivers, like those other three in Sussex, the Arun, the Adur, and the Ouse, run independent of the chalk hills, and cut through them from the following cause: the Wealden heights, the forest ridge that is, in which all six take their rise, is conceived to be geologically much older than the North or the South Downs, and it is presumed that the rivers had already formed their valleys, and were already beginning to erode the surface of the land before the chalk hills began to arise, so that as the Downs gradually rose the little rivers continued their sawing, and kept to their original level while the great heaps of white shell which were building up our hills rose upon either side of their valleys. This theory, unfortunately, like most scientific theories, and especially geological ones, is traversed by another theory equally

[Sidenote: THE EASTERN ROTHER]

reputable and stoutly maintained by precisely the same authorities, to wit, that the shells of which the Chalk Downs are composed are those of marine animals and were laid down under the sea. If this was the case it is impossible to see how the little rivers can have continued their erosion while the chalk hills were rising upon either side, for no rivers run along the bottom of the sea. The fact is that this, like ninety-nine out of a hundred other geological theses, reposes upon mere guesswork; we have no evidence worth calling evidence to tell us how the contours of the land were moulded.

The last of the Sussex rivers stands quite outside the scheme of those with which we have been hitherto dealing. It is the Eastern Rother, which rises, indeed, on the same Wealden heights as the others, but does not encounter the chalk hills, for these come to an end west of it in the cliff of Beachy Head. The Eastern Rother runs, therefore, not through a gap but a wide plain, which is marked off on the coast-line by the flats of the marshes before Dunge Ness.

This little river nourishes no considerable town, but a great number of very charming villages stand either upon it or above it; others also less charming, as for instance the somewhat theatrical village of Burwash, whose old church tower, avenue of trees, and Georgian houses, have bred a crop of red-brick villas.

Robertsbridge, however, is a paradise for any one, and contains or did contain in the cellars of its principal inn, the George, some of the best port at its price to be found in England. Within the drainage area of this river also stands (upon the Brede, a tributary) the height which was known until the Norman invasion as “Hastings Plain,” but has, since the great conflict, supported the abbey and the village of Battle. The harbour mouth of this river is the town of Rye, a haven which it is still possible to make, though with difficulty, but which was until quite the last few generations a trading-place of importance.

With the mention of the Eastern Rother our survey of the river system of Sussex must close, for, though tributaries of the Wey rise within the political boundaries of the county, while the source of the Mole is also within those boundaries, their systems properly belong to the Thames valley and to Surrey.

We have now some idea of the general configuration of the county, of the nature of its

[Sidenote: GENERAL VIEW OF THE COUNTY]

landscape and its soil, and of the relief upon which it is built. The reader may perhaps grasp in one glance the Wealden heights running along the northern horizon, the wide rolling belt of the clay weald between those heights and the Downs broken here and there by rocks and sandstone, patched with pines, the Downs themselves running in one vast wall for their fifty or sixty miles of stretch from the Hampshire border to Beachy Head, and the coastal plain to the south of them. There have also been indicated in this first part of the book, though briefly, the various types of towns and villages and buildings which these four belts produce; it has been shown how the parallelism of all the four tilts somewhat from the north-west to the south-east, so that all four end at last upon the sea; and it has been shown how the rivers run from the Weald, cut right through the Downs, and form along the coast the main harbours of the county.

With such a general plan before us we can go on to speak more particularly of the history upon which modern Sussex reposes, and to describe in more detail the towns and the sites connected with the story of this countryside: of Chichester which was its spiritual capital; Arundel, Bramber, and Lewes, which were its defences; Midhurst, Petworth, Pulborough, Horsham, Steyning, Uckfield, and the rest, which are still its Wealden market towns; its six ancient harbours, and the recent change which more numerous roads and more rapid methods of locomotion have begun to bring upon the county, not wholly for its good.