Chapter III: Part II: The Historical Development of Sussex (1)

The pre-history of Sussex is unknown. The county does not lie (as a first glance at the map might suggest) upon the main track between the metallic districts of the West of England and the Straits of Dover. That track was forced north by the indent of Southampton Water, and pursued its way, perhaps originally through Salisbury Plain, ultimately through Winchester, and so by Farnham, where it struck and followed the North Downs to Canterbury, which was the common centre for the ports of the Kentish coast. Sussex, moreover, was not only off this main prehistoric trade route, but also, as has been previously explained in the first portion of this book, was cut off to some extent on the north by the Weald, and to the east and to the west by Romney Marsh and Chichester Harbour respectively.

We may, therefore, presume that before the advent of the Romans the district was a very isolated and perhaps a very backward piece of Britain. Convenient as were its harbours, and comparatively short as was the trajectory from the opposite coast, it suffered from what handicaps all such coast lines, that is, the absence of a wealthy hinterland. London was more easily made through Kent or by sailing up the estuary of the Thames, and the great roads to the north which converged on London were better arrived at through Kent and by way of the Watling Street than through Sussex.

All we can positively say is that the western part of the county was presumably inhabited by a tribe called the Regni, whose capital was, we may believe, upon the site of Chichester. For the rest all is conjecture.

It is equally true that we have no direct history of Sussex during the 400 years of the Roman occupation. But here, as is the case almost everywhere in England, the material evidences of Rome and of the vast and prosperous civilisation which she founded in the island, are in number quite out of proportion with the meagre documents that speak of her occupation. The whole soil of

[Sidenote: THE ROMAN BASIS]

England is strewn thickly with the relics of Rome; and the reader will perhaps pardon a digression on a matter of such historical importance, because, though it does not concern Sussex alone, it does concern the history of England in general very much, and therefore the history of Sussex in particular. Nor can any one understand an English countryside unless he has already understood what the Romans did for this province of theirs, Britain.

There has arisen in the last two generations a school which is now weakening, but which has already had a very ill effect upon the general comprehension of European history. This school was German in its origin, meticulous in its methods, feeble in its historic judgment, and very strongly influenced by the bias of race and religion. It attempted to establish the thesis that the effect of Rome upon Europe had been exaggerated, and that the North especially had been but little moulded by the Latin order. This was partly true in the case of Northern Germany, for though the German civilisation is a Latin civilisation, yet it is and remains Latin only in the second degree. German thought, building, law, religion, and the rest are Latin, or they are nothing; but they are imported Latin. They are not of that Latinity which grows up and lives and takes root in the soil. There lies behind them a sort of vague thing which has never taken form, never is expressed, but evidently colours all North German life and makes it different from the life of Southern, Western, and civilised Europe; for Rome never occupied the Baltic plain.

But though this insufficient influence of Rome be obviously true with regard to Northern Germany, whose poor soil and shallow harbours had never tempted the Roman eagles, it is profoundly untrue of Britain. By far the greater part of our historical towns can be proved to be Roman in origin, and it is to be presumed that of the remainder most will ultimately furnish, or at least could furnish, proofs of a similar foundation. But though Britain was thoroughly kneaded into the stuff of the Empire, the accidents of the barbarian wars lend arguments to those who would minimise the vast effect of her early civilisation upon her subsequent history.

For the continuity of Roman speech and of the civilisation of the Empire was sharply broken in Britain by the invasion (gradual, but very disastrous) of the North Sea pirates,--raids which

[Sidenote: THE SAXON RAIDS]

exercised an increasing pressure throughout the end of the fourth century, and which in the middle of the fifth began to triumph over the resistance of the native population. How far the effect of these raids was constructive, the foundation of a race, and how far merely destructive, the marring of a social order, we will discuss later; it is sufficient for the moment to point out that they prevented us, when we re-entered civilisation, from harking back with certitude to our origins as Gaul or the Rhine or Spain could to theirs. We have, indeed, our hagiographers, but they are not, like the hagiographers of the Continent, in direct connection with the Fathers of the Church and with the Imperial centre. We had, indeed, a flourishing monastic system, but we could not say of it as could Gaul, that it went right up to the time of Julian the Apostate, derived from St. Martin, and was linked with the memory of a once strong and ordered state. There is, therefore, more room for discussion and for denial of the Roman influence in Britain than in any other province of the Empire; more even than in Africa, where the complete and sudden wiping out of the Roman genius by the Mahommedan religion has fossilised, as it were (and therefore preserved), enormous evidences of Roman activity.

With the darkness of the Saxon invasions to aid them, authorities of considerable weight have been found to advance such propositions as that the total population of Roman Britain amounted to but little more than a million souls; that the continuity of London, York, Leicester, and the other original cities is doubtful, and so forth. There is nothing so fantastic but it has had a home for a short space among the historians of our universities, so long as the phantasy was in opposition to the general spirit of Europe and to the grandeur of the Roman name.

It is best for a modern reader to forget these vagaries, and to found himself upon the constant judgment of permanent historical work--upon the common sense, as it were, of Europe as we receive it handed on through the historical traditions of the Middle Ages, and as we see it developing since the renaissance of learning in the sixteenth century. We can believe that Roman Britain, though we do not know its exact population, was very densely populated (Gibbon, the best authority, perhaps, puts it highest), and that, at least towards the close of the third century, it was full of flourishing towns, and intersected everywhere by great military roads; it was peaceable, wealthy, and a very close part of the Roman unity.

[Sidenote: THE ROMAN TOWNS]

Sussex was no exception to this rule. Small as was the extent of its then habitable or thickly-populated part (virtually confined to the coast-plain, for the Downs could not be inhabited, the villages of their foot-hills were few, and the belt between them and the Weald was difficult of access), small as was that portion, it contained two considerable towns--Anderida and Regnum. Anderida lay upon the site of Pevensey, Regnum is Chichester. What other settlements it had of a strictly Roman nature, as distinguished from the Celtic villages and the isolated farms held both by Celtic and by Roman masters, we cannot tell. The Roman remains of Lewes prove it (as does its site) to have been a place of importance since the beginning of history, but we cannot identify it with certitude. Arundel, a place obviously as old, has hitherto furnished no Roman relics. It is possible that Bramber was fortified; and it is fairly certain, though it is not positive history, that the mouth of the old estuary at Shoreham was the Portus Adurni. More than this we cannot say.

But there is contained in Sussex a further and more striking evidence of the power of Rome than even the line of the wall at Chichester or the ruins of Anderida. This is to be found in the great track of the Stane Street, the Roman road which led from the East Gate of Chichester to London, and of which so large a part is in actual use to-day.

This great monument of our past is equalled by little else in our island as a dramatic witness of the source from which we spring. The Roman wall between Tyne and Solway has afforded much more food for scholarship, and is in places of a more active effect upon the eye, but it does not appear before us as does the Stane Street, possessed of a constant historic use, and explaining the development of a whole district.

This military way can be traced, with a few gaps, for a space of fifty miles and more; from the eastern gate of Chichester to the neighbourhood of Epsom, where it passes just between Lord Rosebery’s house and the race-course, having crossed the Surrey border in the neighbourhood of Ockley, and pursued its way through Dorking churchyard across Burford Bridge, through the gardens of Juniper Hall, and so northwards and eastwards.

The line of it in Sussex is clear to any one who glances at an Ordnance map. It is a hard road over the first mile on leaving Chichester. At the village of West Hampnet, some unknown cause in the

[Sidenote: THE STANE STREET]

remote past has diverted it, and the original line is lost in the fields behind the workhouse of the place; but within another mile it once more coincides with the present high road and goes straight for the Downs. Close upon it was founded the Abbey of Boxgrove which, like Hyde and Westminster and so many others, owed its site to the presence of a great national way. It goes on over the shoulder of Halnacker Hill, then plunges through the north wood where it is no longer traceable as a road, but as a high ridge for several miles. It emerges upon the open grass of the Downs at Gumber Farm, where it still marks a division between ancient properties and modern fields. It then climbs down the escarpment of the hills upon the north side in a great curve which has given its name to the farm of Cold Harbour,--for the word Cold harbour, which so frequently occurs in English topography, is probably derived from the Latin “Curbare,” and marks the points where the usually dead straight line of the Roman road was compelled for some local reason to adopt a curve.

Immediately at the foot of this curve is to be found the little village of Bignor, which contains one of the most perfect Roman pavements in England, and which has been conjectured to be the “Ad Decimam”--the tenth milestone from Chichester. It may be the villa of a private estate or (more probably) the military residence of a small garrison. From this point to Pulborough Bridge the track of the road is conjectural, with the exception of a few stretches, where, even to-day, the discoloration of the earth in the ploughed fields marks the old line in the Stane Street. At Hardham, however, just before it reaches the marshes of the Arun, its passage is clearly discernible due east of a still defined camp which stands in between Petworth branch line and the main line of the L.B.S.C.R., just before their junction. Immediately beyond, on the farther side, stood the old Priory of Hardham which, like Boxgrove, must have owed its site to the neighbourhood of the way.

The remaining mile over the marshes to Pulboro’ Bridge is, of course, absolutely lost. It is a universal rule of topography throughout Britain, that where a Roman causeway crossed a marsh, it has been lost in the barbaric centuries by a slow process of sinking into the soft soil below. But the direction which the Stane Street must have followed when the causeway existed is not difficult to determine; it is to be decided by a consideration which

[Sidenote: THE STANE STREET]

the historians of the county have not hitherto remarked. It is this. If one stands upon the height of Gumber above Cold Harbour Hill and notes the direction of the Stane Street as it crosses the Downs, one finds it pointing straight at Pulborough Bridge. Or again, if one lays a ruler along the line of the Stane Street upon an Ordnance map so as to cover the section between Halnacker and Gumber, the prolongation of that line strikes to within a yard or two of Pulborough Bridge. It is, therefore, as certain as anything can be that the road made for this point, that the Roman causeway across the marsh ran directly from Hardham to the bridge, and that the Arun was crossed sixteen hundred years ago at the same place as it is to-day.

The point though new can hardly be questioned. Roads of this sort were necessarily laid down by a method of “sighting” from one distant point of the horizon to the other. In no other way could their straightness be achieved, and there can be no doubt that the first surveyor, in laying down the track from the south to the north side of the Downs, was guided by signals from the crest of the ridge; the line was given him by watchers upon the summit who could observe the parties on the southern slope below and the distant Arun to the north, and who had already determined from that vantage place the point at which the river could be most easily crossed.

At Pulborough Bridge the Stane Street again becomes a hard road, and with such slight deviations as the long centuries of its history have caused at Adversane and Parbook (they never leave the straight by so much as fifty yards) it takes its way right through the heart of the county. Billingshurst stands upon it, breaking its exact line by a growth of little encroaching freeholds. It does not cease to be a county road for many miles farther; it arrives at Five Oaks Green, there enters the heart of the Weald, where even to this day there are but very few houses; it dwindles to a lane, and so reaches its second crossing of the Arun at Alfordean Bridge, where traces of Roman fortification still appear. The remaining two and a half miles of its course through the county are either lost under the plough, overgrown in thickets (such as “Roman’s Wood”), or preserved as stretches of foot-path. It is here a deserted track, and enters Surrey at last near Ruckman’s Farm.

There may have been other Roman roads of the regular and military sort piercing the county.

[Sidenote: OTHER ROMAN WAYS]

Some have maintained that one such road ran from the mouth of the Adur up to London, and another from Pevensey through Mayfield also to London. It is absolutely certain that in the Roman time there must have been roads following some such tracks: evidences of one, at least, have been discovered at Haywards Heath and at Reigate, while it is a fair inference that the march of William the Conqueror from Pevensey through Hastings up on to Hastings Plain, where he fought his great battle, was made along an ancient way. But it may be doubted whether any of the other lines of communication in Sussex were of a true military nature, or possessed the permanence of what we usually call a Roman road. At any rate, they have left no evidences which warrant our asserting that they were ever of the same nature as the great Stane Street.

We know one or two more things about Roman Sussex. We know that the industry of the Eastern Weald was an iron industry. We may be fairly certain that there must have been a flourishing agriculture along the sea-plain to maintain its great towns; but we know nothing more until we enter with the Saxon invasions, the beginning of the second phase in the history of the county.

These invasions are themselves mythical in their details. Though the main fact of their success at the eastern and southern coast-line is historical beyond dispute their story reposes upon legends, which, as the reader need hardly be reminded, are not trustworthy. From the oral traditions of a very barbarous people possessed of hardly any continuous institutions, split up into dozens of little tribes which differed from each other in local patois, and were possessed of no unity or national spirit, the tales of the pirate raids were handed on till at last they were written down hundreds of years after, when civilisation had once more penetrated into the southern and eastern part of the island, and a sort of rude literature could re-arise to give them for what they were worth. A traditional and probably mythical being, called in the legend “Aella,” is reported to have effected the first regular landing upon the Sussex coast towards the beginning of the sixth century, or rather to have turned into a permanent settlement those temporary raids which had been common for a century and more before his time. The feature of this invasion which most powerfully struck the barbaric imagination was the fall of Anderida. So violent was the effect produced upon the victims and their

[Sidenote: THE BREAK-DOWN OF ROME]

despoilers, that the Saxon Chronicle some centuries later records a tradition to the effect that not one of its inhabitants was left alive when the city was stormed. This, of course, is no truer than any other history of the sort; but it is valuable as pointing to the violence of the struggle. Anderida was, moreover, one of the very few cities of Europe where, in the break-down of the Roman Empire, municipal life was actually destroyed. For we know by the evidence of an eye-witness (which is a very different thing from legend), that after so comparatively short a lapse of time as two hundred years from the time of the invasion, the ruined walls were still standing and the place was uninhabited.

What form the disaster took after this date we cannot tell; but we can derive some idea of its severity from the break-down of the native language. We know that, mixed with the Celtic roots of Sussex place-names, with the purely Celtic names of its main rivers, with the Celtic and possibly Roman names of its villages, there is a Teutonic admixture so welded in with the rest as to be inseparable from it. Billingshurst, for example, springs presumably from a Celtic source, and records, like Billingsgate, the worship of Belinus. But this “hurst,” like all the other “hursts” up and down the south of England, is almost certainly a Teutonic ending.

It is to be noted that Teutonic terminations are particularly noticeable along the coast itself, from whence the invasion of the pirates came. Hastings is entirely an un-Latin and un-Celtic name. So is Selsea. So is Shoreham. Half the names along the Sussex coast must be purely Teutonic; and even of the remainder one cannot be sure how much of their framework has survived since the days before the pirate invasion. Thus “ness” (as in Dungeness) may be Northern, but it may also be Latin.

We can, again, be certain of the thoroughness of the cataclysm by the effect of the invasion upon the philosophy of the place. In Sussex, whatever may have happened elsewhere, there was a complete disappearance of the Christian religion. The raids must have been many and severe, and the last permanent settlement of the barbarians successful, to have produced such a result. For Britain round about the year 500 was obviously as Christian as any other province, and to have destroyed Christianity in the period which saw St. Eligius and Dagobert in their full power beyond the narrow English Channel necessarily means that the attack was very powerful and very ruthless.

[Sidenote: EXTINCTION OF CHRISTIANITY]

It is of particular importance to insist upon the Christianity of _Sussex_ in this respect. For, as we consider the south of England, which was the more civilised portion of the island, we remark that in Devonshire and Cornwall Christianity made a stand which maintained a continuity of the faith. In Kent, again, there was very probably a relic of Christianity. A Christian queen was upon the throne there a hundred years before the neighbouring county had so much as heard of the gospel. A Christian church was in existence in Canterbury before Augustine landed--though whether it had survived from Roman times we cannot tell; nor do we know the fate of the central district of Hampshire and Dorsetshire, except that we may presume that the Christian religion and the tradition of civilisation could hardly have been quite destroyed upon the borders of the Christian Severn valley and of the Christian Damnonian peninsula, to which were so continually flowing the influences of Christian Brittany and Christian Ireland and Christian Wales. In Sussex, therefore, alone of the southern counties, we may state it as historically certain that civilisation was totally destroyed, and that the faith which is the central expression of civilisation was stamped out.

Another line of argument leads to the same conclusion. It is that drawn from the story of St. Wilfrid. In this story we see St. Wilfrid in his exile landing in Sussex, and finding the barbarians fallen to so low an ebb that they had even lost the craft of fishing. The Roman arts had, of course, long ago disappeared. It is quite possible that men had here even forgotten how to plough in the general break-down which followed the coming of the pirates. At any rate there was a famine when St. Wilfrid came. St. Wilfred taught them how to make nets, and there followed what always follows when savages come across civilisation (if that civilisation is beneficent)--the savages accepted it _en bloc_, customs, faith, and all; even in their fragmentary records they talk henceforth of “Ides” and “Kalends.” They made St. Wilfred their bishop, and he established his see (possibly from a vague tradition of the Roman times) at Selsea.

The place in which he built his first cathedral is now perhaps under the sea. The Roman buildings and the establishments of the city were already in danger, when, in the eleventh century, the see was removed to the neighbouring town of Chichester, where it remained in a continuous tradition which lasted till the Reformation. The district of Selsea

[Sidenote: SELSEA]

lingered on as a batch of islands, flooded at high tide, until comparatively recent times. It is said that even as late as the Tudors the patch now known as “The Park” was really a park, and that the rapid current known as the Looe stream corresponded to a ravine in that royal domain. At any rate the whole place is to-day a mass of tangled rocks and shallows, mixed up with which we may presume are the ruins of the Roman and early Saxon buildings. It is known as the “Owers,” and there stands upon it a lighthouse which is one of the principal marks of the Sussex coast; nor can any ships of considerable burthen go between these rocks and the shore. The great liners on their way to Southampton all pass outside: the fishing-boats and coasting-vessels can take the shorter inner passage, if they have a tide with them, through the Looe stream.

The remaining history of Sussex until the advent of the Normans is obscure and meagre. Here, as in the rest of England, the barbarism of the Dark Ages was tempered, of course, by the existence of the historic and organised machinery of the Catholic Church, but they remained barbaric, and nowhere more barbaric than in Britain. The wound of the Saxon invasion was never really healed. There are those who maintain that we feel its effects to this day.

From the period of the conversion which may roughly be said to have occupied the last twenty years of the seventh century, right away down to the tenth, with its violent internal convulsions ending in the Danish conquest, Sussex almost disappears from history. It is true to say that in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of this period we hear more of Gaul than we do of the English county. It must have been singularly free from the storm of the Danish invasions until close upon the end of the ninth century, when we get the landing of Hasting and his march up the valley of the Rother. But even that raid failed, for Alfred had already restored peace to the south of England.

It is at this period also that we begin to have historical evidence of the existence of the fortified places of Sussex.

The opportunities afforded by Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, and the rest must have been recognised from prehistoric times. There also existed from prehistoric times the great entrenchments on the Downs. But it is not until the close of the ninth and beginning of the tenth centuries that we get documentary proofs of the way in which these

[Sidenote: THE STRATEGIC POINTS]

advantages were seized. Thus we know from Alfred’s will that at the beginning of the tenth century Arundel was already fortified and already a king’s castle.

Of the smaller projecting spur of Lewes, similarly defended by marshes and similarly easy to isolate by a ditch across the narrow neck which connects it with the Downs, we have not indeed direct evidence so early. But several smaller places dependent upon it and in its neighbourhood are mentioned at the same time; and a little later, under Athelstan, the town itself is mentioned with this particular mark, that of the four Sussex mints (which were here and at Hastings and at Chichester) two were permitted to be established in Lewes, numbers which point to its being, even at that early date, the recognised capital of the whole county.

Bramber, we may be certain from the name, though documents are lacking, was fortified at least as early as this period.

In a word, all the gaps of the Downs were held in a military fashion, and had entered into the scheme of the county as strongholds, guarding the river passes for one hundred and fifty or one hundred and seventy years before they fell into the hands of the Norman invaders. But of the rest of the development of the county in Saxon times we know so very little that even conjecture is hardly worth our while. The place-names are all that indicate to us what Saxon foundation the towns and villages of the Weald may have received. Their gradual development, the granting of their charters, and the documentary proof of their existence and commercial importance we do not get until after the Conquest. These proofs we shall be able the better to examine when we come to that event, and especially when we analyse the way in which the rape of Bramber grew up under the leadership of the Warrens.

The end of the barbaric period in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and its enormous effect upon the future of England, are, however, associated with the county; and the complete obscurity within which it had lain for so many generations is partially compensated for by the name of Godwin. That great earl, with his strength, his vices, and his ambitions, was altogether a Sussex man. He was the son of Wulnoth, a knight of the South Saxons.

It has sometimes been regretted that feudalism in England did not follow the line which it did on the Continent, and that the various districts of England were not coalesced under great overlords,

[Sidenote: GODWIN]

so as to form true provinces and thus to intensify the life of the nation. These regrets may or may not be just, but Godwin very nearly succeeded in satisfying that ideal. He was by far the greatest man in Sussex, as he was in England. He held nearly sixty manors, and that not merely in a technical sense and for a merely military reason, as did the great overlords immediately later under the Conqueror hold manors in yet larger numbers, but actually (we may presume) and with a true lordship. Among them are many names to be recognised to-day. There is Beeding which is under the Downs, beyond Bramber, a place called with fine irony Upper Beeding; it lies in a hollow, damp all the year round, while Lower Beeding is set upon a high hill. There is Climping, the seaside village near Little Hampton, of which little now remains. There is Rottingdean, Brighton itself, Fulking, Salescombe, Wiston (which is the master of Chactonbury), and Ashington and Washington close by. Godwin, indeed, for his economic power reposed upon Sussex, and it is curious that his connection with the county has been so little emphasised by historians.

With the Norman Conquest, Sussex, like the rest of England, re-enters history. And that in a peculiar manner, for, as has been seen, of all the districts of England, Sussex had suffered the deepest eclipse during the barbaric period, and by the peculiar fact that the invasion of civilisation came from Normandy, was most advantaged in the period immediately following. The contrast was abrupt and striking. Here was a district of which, as we have seen, practically no mention is made between the fall of the Roman power and the last efforts of Godwin. It is cut off from the rest of England by the Andred’s Weald. The only considerable story in connection with it is that of its conversion. It can boast no great monasteries founded in that time, as all the rest of England can boast; it can show no great military leader, nor even the scene of any great military disaster, for Ockley itself was beyond its borders. The advent of the last invaders, but invaders this time who bring with them constructive power and the full European tradition, is from the shore immediately opposing its own. A short day’s sail away there ran the coast of Normandy, where a race of Gallo-Romans, with a slight but transforming admixture of Scandinavian blood, were chafing under their superabundant energy. Already for nearly a century a great intercourse must have

[Sidenote: THE NORMAN INVASION]

existed between the harbours to the north and the south of the Channel. It was from Bosham that Harold sailed; the Court of Edward had been full of Normans, and one has but to cross the Channel in a little boat to see how the advance of the arts after the darkness of the ninth century must have increased communication between Normandy and the shores of Sussex. A man will run in a five tonner from Shoreham to Dieppe close hauled into a fresh south-westerly wind between the morning and the evening of a summer’s day; he will run from Dieppe into Rye with such a wind on his quarter during the daylight of almost any day in the year, except perhaps in the mid-winter season.

With such a wind William sailed from St. Valery in the autumn of 1066. He landed at Pevensey. He marched along the coast to Hastings, and then struck up north and a little east for four or five miles to where the Saxon force lay on the defensive upon a rounded height above the valley of the Brede, called “Hastings Plain.”

A pedantic discussion, into which we need not enter, has waged round the exact name of the spot where the battle was fought. One of the principal authorities for the history of the battle (but not a contemporary authority) calls it several times “Senlac.” It is just possible that he was mis-spelling some local name. Halnacker is similarly mis-spelt “Hanac” in the title deeds of Boxgrove Abbey. But the name as it stands is a Gascon name, and in all probability was given to some portion of the land long after the battle because a Gascon gentleman had acquired manorial rights there. Every other authority alludes to it as Hastings, or Hastings Plain, and every Sussex man can see why, for there is nothing commoner in the country than the calling of one of the uplands by the name of some neighbouring, inhabited, and settled spot in the lowlands, possibly because the inhabitants of that neighbouring and inhabited spot had some sort of territorial rights in the upland place so named. Thus one has on the Downs, between Arundel and Goodwood, “Fittleworth Wood,” six or seven miles away from Fittleworth itself, and the use of the word “plain” for a stretch of the uplands is as common as can be,--for instance Plummers Plain between Lower Beeding and Handcross.

We may take it, then, for the purposes of this short description, that among the Saxons of the time, or rather the local Sussex men of the time, “Hastings Plain” was the name given to the hill of stunted trees and grass up which the

[Sidenote: THE NORMAN WEALD]

Normans charged late on that October afternoon. By sunset the issue was determined, and the victory gave the crumbling and anarchic Saxon state back again to Europe. The disorders of the Church were reformed, a centralised and efficient government was introduced, the art of building received, as it always does with the coming of fresh vigour, a vast impetus, and the history of the England that we know began.

In connection with the Norman Conquest it is of some historical importance to ask one’s self what was the remaining function of the Weald, the great forest which ran along the rising swell of clay and sand, and bounded Sussex on the north?

We have seen that in prehistoric times the Weald was undoubtedly the obstacle which delimited Sussex, and made all this district a maritime province with its towns on the sea. The Romans pierced the Weald with one great military road and probably several minor ways. But they did not settle it thickly. One may say that with the exception of a trace or two of fortifications it is practically destitute of Roman remains. It may possibly, or even probably, have contained many isolated farms in the prosperous middle and conclusion of the Roman period, but with the advent of the barbarians it fell again, as did so many other parts of Europe, into the prehistoric conditions, and we have at least one allusion in Anglo-Saxon history to its desertion, in the story of that Saxon king who fled during the tenth century from his enemies and hid in the Weald for many months. We know then that in Roman times it was traversed by at least one great military road and probably by several others; that in the Dark Ages it was certainly a dividing line between the coast district and the Thames valley; that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was thoroughly civilised again. The main historical question or doubt relates to the eleventh century. Was this old wild condition of the forest a complete barrier to any travel northward from the coast at the time of the Conquest?

It may be seriously doubted that it was such a barrier. It is probable that a certain amount of communication between North and South had already arisen, and, as we shall see in a moment, it is certain that communication became very vigorous in the centuries immediately succeeding Hastings.

The nature of the obstacle, it must be remembered, has been mistaken by historians, notably by Freeman and by Green, and by all the smaller modern men, such as Mr. Davis and Mr. Oman

[Sidenote: THE WEALD]

of Oxford, who copy what they see written in the popular histories. The Weald was never an impenetrable forest; no Northern European forests are. It was not cut by great lines of marsh, which are the chief obstacle to men under primitive conditions. It was not even dense, as are some of the English forests, for example the beech forests of the Downs. Those pieces of the Weald which have been left uncultivated, and which remain to-day almost in their original state, show us clearly what the whole district once was. It was simply a vague, long belt which it did not pay to cultivate in early times. Small, strong oak-trees stood in it, never very close together. Here and there on sandy wastes and heaths were furze and ferns. The clay did, indeed, give rise to many pools, stagnant meres, and sodden patches of soil. But there could never have been great difficulty in getting across it northwards, nor any lack of forest tracks from one side to the other, nor any great prevalence of dense thickets in which enemies could hide. Its chief character as a barrier was that of loneliness. For some sixteen or twenty miles, for a full day’s march that is, you had a chance in the early centuries as you went across the Weald of not meeting a man, and this old character is still remembered by any one who walks along the Stane Street from Five Oaks Green to Ockley. But you certainly could not have gone five miles without seeing some evidence of man’s activities--a road, a wall, a well, a felled tree, or a cast weapon. The Weald was, therefore, never a _military_ obstacle, and to talk about the “impenetrable forest of the Weald” checking William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings is to show complete ignorance of the nature of Sussex. It was, however, an obstacle to the spread of ideas, speech, folklore, and the rest, and did maintain the isolation of Sussex down to quite recent times. It keeps traces of that character still.

William then was not prevented from his march on London by the Weald. He went back at his leisure to the sea coast to secure his communications, marched up to Dover, garrisoning every harbour on his way, and then took the great north-east road through Kent, which has been the line of invasion, of commerce, and foreign travel in our island from the very origins of history.

His own personal effort appears after this to pass from the history of the county, but the effect of the invasion upon Sussex was, as we have just remarked, enormous. It will be seen from what has preceded this that the field lay open for the effects

[Sidenote: THE NORMAN ORGANISATION]

of the new vigour. Nowhere had the remnants of Roman civilisation more thoroughly decayed. The old British stock and the admixture, such as it was, of Teutonic blood had mixed to form a population very much what we see to-day in the villages of Sussex, where most of the people are short, with dark, keen eyes, but a few tall and large, with the light hair, the slow gait, and the heavy bodies of the marsh men from Frisia and the Baltic.

Again the reorganisation of Sussex begins from the sea.

In the administrative division of the county Rapes, as they are called, were mapped out, though it must not be imagined that there was anything original in the selection of the particular districts. The clear Norman brain and the weighty Norman power would certainly make definite boundaries where before there had been nothing but the vague, local feeling of the countryside to determine the limits of the separate parts of the county; but the general set of the divisions was certainly inherited by the Norman from the older and semi-barbaric state of things. Moreover, even after the Norman organisation was fully established, the exact boundaries of each Rape were not always very well determined. Thus the parish of Slindon remained for centuries doubtful between Arundel and Chichester Rape, to which last it has finally been attributed.

In number the Rapes were six, and were called after the towns of Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings.

It will be noted that in each case a town which could be reached by ships was chosen as the basis of the division, and that the tides of the Channel here, as always, were the creators of the county.

The importance which the county was to hold in the new state of affairs is marked at once by the names of those to whom four of the Rapes were given: Montgomery, Braose, Warren, and Moreton, all of them closely connected with the family of the Conqueror, and all of them set, not as proprietors, but as military overlords over a vast number of manors. It would probably be seen, if an exact computation were taken, that, with the exception of the counties Palatine, feudal power was nowhere more concentrated than on this stretch of the sea coast. Here it was that William’s invasion had proved successful; here that new dangers might be expected; here, therefore, that he organised in the most thorough manner and under chiefs most closely connected with himself and his family, the

[Sidenote: BUILDING UP OF LEWES RAPE]

defence of the land. These few men count between them five-sevenths of the whole county.

Before speaking of what was probably the principal economic factor in the new life which Sussex received from the invasion, the foundation of monasteries, it is of interest to show how a rape was built up from the sea by the new-comers, and the best example we can take to exhibit this process is the rape delivered into the hands of Warren, the Duke’s son-in-law, in overlordship. We shall see it spreading from the centre of its ancient capital, fed, it may be presumed, from its ancient harbour, and slowly extending northward a jurisdiction gradually acquired over the Weald, and later even overleaping the northern boundary of the forest ridge. The whole process occupied about two hundred years. Here then are the chief points in the growth of this Rape of Lewes.

Let us note, in the first place, its natural boundaries. The Ouse bounds it to the east and the Adur to the west, and the strip of land runs north and south between these two river valleys; it starts from the sea coast by which entry is made into the county, and loses itself in the forest to the north.

Its principal town, Lewes, has all those characteristics which distinguish the central towns of the countrysides of Western Europe, save that it possesses no cathedral. It is a place naturally susceptible of fortification. It is Roman, and probably pre-Roman in its origins. It possesses a natural means of approach in the shape of the river beneath it; good water, a dry and naturally well-drained soil, and (a peculiar feature which is to be discovered in every case throughout Gaul, Northern Italy, Western Germany, and Britain) it lies, not in the centre, but right to one side of the countryside which takes its name from it. This feature, which is so marked in the case of the great Norman bishoprics and of most other divisions of the later Empire, is probably due to the fact that where a river or range of hills or great forest formed a natural boundary for a district, it at the same time formed the main natural defence for the chief stronghold of that district. Whatever the cause may be, the chief towns of the various divisions into which Western Europe has fallen are nearly always near the frontier of those divisions. Canterbury is near the sea; Edinburgh near the north of the Lothians. Rouen is by no means central as to Normandy. Even Avranches, Bayeux, and Coutances are upon the edges of their

[Sidenote: MILITARY VALUE OF LEWES]

respective dioceses. And in this county of Sussex, Chichester, the cathedral town, is close to the western border, Arundel is right up against the border of its own Rape, Bramber within a stone’s throw of its eastern boundary. Pevensey alone is somewhat central. Hastings is again thrown up towards the eastern side of the belt which takes its name.

Lewes, then, is the stronghold upon which the chance division of the county had grown up in the Dark Ages. The Normans come; they add to the Saxon fortifications a great Norman castle, and they define more accurately the Rape whose general conception they have inherited from the men whom they have just conquered. They survey (the results of their survey remain in Doomsday), and, having done so, for the next four or five generations they push northward, increasing the agricultural value of the villages as they cultivate them, and extending the rule of man over nature farther and farther into the forest of the Weald.

The constructive effort of the Norman begins by his arrangement of government. He settles upon each of the great divisions the head of some great family, who is nominally the overlord of numerous parishes within that boundary, and who is practically the head of the garrison of the central castle, and the receiver of certain small dues from the numerous villages or manors of which he is technically the lord. In the case of Lewes this function fell, as we have seen, to William of Warren, who was a son-in-law of William the Conqueror, and had distinguished himself in the fight upon Hastings Plain. His residence is in the Castle at Lewes, and undoubtedly his chief political function is to guard this entry to the county. He rebuilds that castle, and he is the custodian of the local survey.

What he does for a port we cannot tell at this distance of time. We know that the marshy land at the foot of the castle was not an estuary of the sea at this epoch, and was probably even passable in the eleventh century. We know this from the coins and relics which have been found in it. We know also that the present harbour of Newhaven was diverted later than the Conquest, and that the old mouth of the river ran somewhat to the east of it. We may conjecture with great probability that the port upon which Lewes was dependent for its commerce and provisions and reinforcements was somewhere near the old mill-pond between Newhaven and Seaford.

[Sidenote: LEWES RAPE INLAND]

Chief among the manors dependent on Lewes and the personality of De Warren we find Brighton under its old Saxon name. It is a large and important place. It controls the chief arable district which falls within the command of Lewes Castle and of the Rape thereto appertaining. Rottingdean, next to it, also comes into the great survey, for Rottingdean is along the sea, and the parishes along the sea, as we have so frequently had occasion to repeat, are historically the first and economically the most valuable of Sussex.

The next belt inland, the belt of the Downs, was uninhabited then as it is to-day, and will be perhaps throughout a remote future. But the old villages upon the strip of fertile land to the north of them are already well developed by the time the Normans come. Nay, they were Roman before they were Saxon, for Clayton and Ditchling, the two principal centres of the string of villages in this part, contain Roman remains. Keymer also is in Doomsday. So is Hurstpierpoint, under the name of Herste. Immediately northward you get the line of villages which are not developed until the wealth and the population of England have increased with the advent of the new civilisation. Typical of these is Cuckfield. It is not mentioned in Doomsday. It was then perhaps mere forest. It is not until the thirteenth century that it gets its market (from Henry III.), and we know that at that moment it was land held of the Warrens. Finally, at the very end of the same century, within a few years of the meeting of the great parliament of Edward I., and in the seventh year of his reign, we get the first hint of the demarcation of the Sussex border on the forest ridge. There is an inquiry into the rights of the Warrens to the free hunting of ground game in the forest of Worth, which extends over the crest of the forest ridge and down on to the Surrey side.

Here we have an excellent example of the way in which the overlapping of Sussex into what is geographically Surrey occurred. The Warrens are very powerful nobles, much more powerful than those lordships in the Surrey towns who hold positions of no strategic importance, and whose garrisons were therefore not heavily endowed at the time of the Conquest. Being great lords the Warrens extend their hunting as far north as they can into the Weald. They go right up through the forest, over the ridge, and down on to the Surrey side. There is (it may be presumed) some complaint against them for this extravagance,

[Sidenote: THE END AT WORTH]

or some jealousy on the part of the Crown. They are examined, and under the inquisition come out triumphant; so that the effect of their family and of the Conqueror’s original disposition in the Rape may be said to have come to its final result when their claim over the extreme limit of the forest ridge was granted by Edward I., and Worth Forest was admitted to be within their jurisdiction and therefore within the county.

This sketch model, as it were, of the way in which a rape has been built up,--first, the sea fortress, then the Wealden market-town, and lastly, the definition of the forest boundary,--may be borne in mind as we deal with the other five similar divisions into which Sussex fell.

Lewes Rape, which we have just been considering, is the very central Rape of the whole county. If a line be drawn through Stanmer Park from north to south, and prolonged to the sea on one side and to the Surrey border on the other, such a line will be discovered to bisect the county into two almost exactly equal areas, and to bisect the Rape of Lewes in very much the same proportion.

Lewes Rape is not only central, but is also the backbone, as it were, upon which the county has been built up. It is this which makes its development so typical of the general history of Sussex. The three Rapes to the west of it and the two Rapes to the east have been somewhat more open from the beginning of history, but not until one has understood Lewes Rape does one understand the growth of the Bramber, Chichester, and Arundel Rapes to the west, nor of those of Pevensey and Hastings to the east. For all, like Lewes, grew up from the sea, from the harbour mouth and a castle at the back of it, on northward through the old British villages under the Downs, till at last they stretched into the Weald and overlapped into what should properly be Surrey. But this process, though common to all, was modified in every special case by special circumstances to which we shall presently allude.

The Rape of Pevensey is of a curious shape. It narrows somewhat towards the middle and bulges out towards the top, or north end. This appears to be the contrary of what one would expect in a Sussex division, the important part of which always lay round the sea coast, but the cause of the shape thus assumed by the Rape is that in its northern part the iron industry had arisen long before the Norman Conquest, and had thus opened up the Weald; it had also made the

[Sidenote: PEVENSEY RAPE]

government of the area and the collection of taxes from it a subject of ambition for the strongest of the neighbouring lords.

Such a lord was found in the Earl of Moreton, the brother-in-law of the Conqueror, who held the Castle of Pevensey, and who was the first controller of the district after the full Norman organisation began.

Here, as in the case of Hastings, but unlike every other Rape, the seat of government, Pevensey, was actually upon the sea.

The name of Pevensey is instructive of its antiquity. It is probably derived from Celtic roots signifying “the fortification at the far end of the wood,” which would exactly describe an important and fortified sea-coast town situated as Pevensey was situated to the forest from which it took its Roman name; for “Anderida,” or “Andresio,” certainly refers to the Weald, the Celtic forest of “Andred,” of which the Saxons made “the Andredswald.”

Incidentally one may digress to point out how crude and insufficient is the greater part of our hurried modern philology. But for an accident no one would have been able to work out the meaning of this name of Pevensey. It was gradually shortened (after passing through the strangest forms) to “Pemsey,” a comparatively recent change in the spelling, due perhaps to local patriotism, or perhaps to the affectation of some studious landlord who, in reproducing the ancient form, gave us the present spelling of the word, from which we are able to trace its ancient Celtic roots; but how many place-names up and down South England must have been wrongly ascribed to Teutonic origin from our ignorance of the local method of pronunciation!