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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
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