The town of Arundel is singular among English sites of the first rank, from the fact that it has neither increased nor diminished to any considerable extent for at least a thousand years.

It is probable that there was here in Roman times a crossing of the river, though the point is hotly denied by the more pedantic among our historians, because, so far, no Roman remains have been found under the soil of the town, or at least none have been identified by casual visitors. But, whether it was a Roman town or not, it is certain that from the moment the isolated spur upon which the castle stands was crowned with strong fortifications and garrisoned by the central authority of England, a town of much the same size as the modern Arundel must have been grouped round its base.

Those who deal most with the statistics of the early Middle Ages seem most blind to the conclusions of common sense. When they are told that only ten or twenty burgesses are to be discovered in a particular town, according to the evidence of some taxing list, they are willing to jump to the conclusion that only ten or twenty families existed in the place at the time the list was made. Instead of appreciating the very natural attitude of any tax-gatherer to save himself all possible labour, and the certitude that he would put down only those who were assessed in his particular tax, and instead of grasping the fact that, until the later Middle Ages, men paid taxes, not by localities, but by categories (some as King’s men, some as local baron’s men, some as the Church’s men, others according to all manner of local apportionments), they take the very crude way of estimating the particular document they have as an index of total population. It is this, for example, which has led to the astounding conclusion that England at the time of the Norman invasion held less than two million souls, and it is this which makes people misunderstand, if they read modern histories, the nature of a town like Arundel.

So long as the spur above the Arun was protected by marshes and isolated by a narrow neck from the main range of the Downs, so long would it tempt men to form a stronghold there, and the moment that stronghold was held by national forces under the obedience of a national King, it presupposed a county town. It presupposed defence for a market (the later license for a market is quite a different thing; the market existed often for centuries before the license which was usually

only the proof of the King’s growing power); it presupposed butchers under the castle walls, money-changers, men coming to and from the garrison for every sort of purpose, carriers, and—to quote a particular point—barbers; the men of the Dark and early Middle Ages were clean shaven. An Arab fortress does not arise nowadays without a town at its foot, still less would the civilisation of the Dark and Middle Ages produce the stronghold without producing a town as well. And a town means something more than a village.

The bridge at Arundel, which one may believe, though one cannot prove, to be Roman in its origin, used to cross the river somewhat farther down the stream. The line of the modern High Street points directly to that part of the town which now looks very like a continuation of the market-place, and has become a sort of backwater in the traffic of the place. It was originally the direct line to the old bridge. Those acquainted with Arundel will best appreciate the site of the old crossing of the river when they learn that the modern Bridge Hotel lies exactly between the ancient and the modern bridges, and the line of the causeway eastward can further be traced by the existence at the farther end of it, up against the high land, of the old building which is seen from the station between the railway and the rising ground.

Amberley Castle, which lay at the north end of Arundel gap, is not preserved in its entirety, but is still a fine ruin, and occupies, as Arundel did, a position of great military strength, though it does not dominate the landscape as does the larger fortress. The strength of Amberley lay in this, that from the north and west it was quite unattainable. If the culture of those fields now known by the highly descriptive name of “Amberley Wildbrook” were to cease for a generation, the old conditions would be reproduced; the floods would soon turn them into marsh again. From the east the approach is not easy: it lies over the rolling spurs of the Downs. From the south there is only one narrow passage on the shelf of the Downs as they slope down to the Arun. It is a tradition in the county that the two castles of Arundel and Amberley were linked together in their system of fortification by an underground passage, and stories are told—with what authority the present writer cannot say—of men who have attempted to explore either end of this passage and succeeded for a certain distance. The thing is possible enough.

Amberley is at any rate one of the very, very old sites of human habitation in Sussex. It is the fashion to decry monastic charters, and it would be difficult to prove, though it was for centuries constantly asserted, that Amberley was part of the original foundation of the Church of Selsea. We have regarded it as sufficiently historical to be included in former pages of this book, but whether the monastic traditional charter be true or false, its very existence proves that the popular legend attributed to the place the highest antiquity.

Houghton, which lies in the neck of the gap, is certainly equally old. That British trackway which was mentioned when the topography of Sussex was being described, and which runs all along the rich loam belt immediately to the north of the Downs, had to cross the river at some point. Now it is the universal rule of the old British trackways that they spy out the narrowest part of the wet lands when they attempt to cross a river. They descend by the nearest spur upon the one side, and make for the nearest firm land upon the other. At this spot the river Arun curves strongly eastward and runs right under the Downs. The marshes to the westward of it are still often flooded and were once wide and impassable, but at Houghton there is a spur coming down across them which, while it does not actually bridge the gap, comes near to doing so. That hollow sunken lane, which is the modern descendant of the old British road, runs from Bury just above the flood line on dry soil; it climbs up on to the spur close to an old and reverend inn called “The St. George and Dragon,” and then turns sharp to the left down along the crest of the spur, making for the shortest possible crossing which the marshes afford. It is not too much to say that we are certain the Arun has been crossed at this point since prehistoric men first attempted to pass the river as they journeyed north of the Downs.

The connection of the place with modern history is also not without interest. It was here that Charles II., escaping in disguise after the battle of Worcester, took what was perhaps his last glass of ale, or at least his last glass of ale in the saddle, on his way to Shoreham, from which happy port he got away to his long exile. The house is still licensed, and cursed be the man who takes that license away.

The historical importance of Houghton is further evidenced by the name of the wood which lies up beyond Whiteways on the slope of the

Downs, which still retains the name of Houghton Forest, indicating that the Crown hunting lands, or, if the modern phrase be preferred, the national preserves, of the neighbourhood depended upon this valley village two miles off. There is little more to say with regard to the historical development of the Rape of Arundel. The villages and towns of the Weald are here, as elsewhere, of a late development. Slinfold, for example, is not mentioned in Doomsday, nor is Billingshurst, though the latter is probably Celtic in origin. Pulborough, which like Billingshurst lies on the Roman road, is the last of the outposts of the Weald to be spoken of in that document, while the excellent village of North Chapel was actually not detached from the parish of Petworth until as late a date as 1693.

The Rape of Chichester has this character to differentiate it from the other rapes of the county, that it is not military. Two explanations of this fact concur and supplement each other. The Rape of Chichester led nowhere, and had no gap in its hills, and the Rape of Chichester was dominated by the Church.

We have seen that all the Rapes of Sussex, leading as they did from north to south, tended to group themselves round highways from the Channel to the Thames valley, and Chichester, with its large though shallow harbour, certainly did afford an admirable entry into England for early navigation; but, once one had made the town, one’s way to London and the North lay up the Stane Street, and this Roman road went through no populous districts nor through any of those gaps which men (after Roman times) would naturally seek for their advance, but went straight over the bleak and desolate Downs, and by the time it got to the crest of these it was within half an hour’s smart riding of the garrison of Arundel. Westward no man would go. The marshes prevented him. Neither would he advance northward; he would have found in that direction, after crossing the pass at Singleton, a fertile valley indeed to raid, but no good opportunity for further progress. Before him would have lain the large sandy wastes which began at what is now the Sussex border by Fernhurst, and continued right on to the neighbourhood of the Thames. They are to-day filling up with villas, but they were, throughout the centuries in which our history was made, empty deserts yielding no corn and affording no shelter of towns or villages to an army. Supposing that an enemy, as for instance a pirate raid of the Danes, were

making for the lowlands of the Rother valley, or farther on for the rich pastures of the Wey (where later was to spring up the wealth and magnificence of Waverley), such a sailors’ raid would certainly have proceeded up the Arun and tried to force its way past Amberley Castle. It would never have made the attempt through Chichester.

There is, then, a clear topographical and strategical reason for the immunity of the Rape of Chichester from military conditions. There is also an ecclesiastical reason. It is a thing not to be forgotten, that from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance the contrast between the ecclesiastical and the civil method of government was a reality. It afforded for men’s minds something of the foil or background which to-day the legal aspect of society gives us as against the commercial, or the conception of a gentleman as against the conception of a rich man. The contrast was, of course, much more vigorous and satisfactory than any of our modern contrasts can be. We see it in a thousand ways illuminating the history of the Middle Ages; by way of sanctuary, by way of the ecclesiastical courts, by way of the atonement which men paid for violence when they founded great monasteries, by way of the technical abstention from capital sentences which the Church rigorously preserved. It is not fantastic to ascribe to this cause the fact that the Rape of Chichester held no important castle and was the site of no great battle. Nor is it ridiculous to imagine that the somewhat ungeographical inclusion of the parish of Slindon into the hundred of Aldwick, and therefore into the Rape of Chichester, had something to do with this ecclesiastical quality. For Slindon was Canterbury’s; Stephen Langton died there.

Here, as in the Rape of Arundel, everything within a march of the sea was in Doomsday, and the actual entries from the sea are known before Doomsday; for example, there is Bosham, from which we have seen that Harold sailed on that pleasure trip of his to Normandy. Right up in the Downs Doomsday parishes continue, as Singleton, which is the mother of West Dean, and lies in the same internal valley or fold of the hills as does that other parish of Upper Waltham, which we have already discovered to be included in the Doomsday Survey in the Rape of Arundel. So with the loam belt to the north of the Downs in this Rape. Graffham is in Doomsday, Cocking is in Doomsday, and while Heyshott is not actually in

Doomsday, it is alluded to a little later as Percy Land held of the Montgomerys. But once we get into the neighbourhood of the Weald the dates fall later. Midhurst is a full borough in the early fourteenth century under Edward II., and not before.

The Rape of Chichester is not only the principal ecclesiastical influence in the county; it is, one might say with no great exaggeration, the only one. By which it is not meant that the Church as a whole did not have its full effect in the county; on the contrary, in moulding the type of Sussex character the Church had, if possible, a greater influence than it had in moulding the character of any other county. To this day we talk of “Scilly Sussex,” which means “holy Sussex,” just as we talk of “Hampshire hogs” or “Kentish men with tails”; and all up and down the soil of the county are to be seen the noblest collection of parish churches in England, the proofs of an ancient devotion.

But ecclesiastical influence, exercised as an economic power and with deliberate intention, is less strong in Sussex during the Middle Ages than in any other county. The monasteries were not very numerous, and when they were rich (which they rarely were) they do not seem to have had a very considerable effect upon the life of the county. The towns, of course, possessed their monks, as did all the towns of England; Lewes had its Benedictines, Arundel its Dominicans, and so forth. But the monks who, throughout the west of Europe, reclaimed land, opened up empty and uncultivated spaces, and were the pioneers of the mediæval civilisation, did nothing for this county on the same scale as they did, say, for the North country, or for East Anglia. The reason is plain. Sussex was cut off while the earlier part of the monastic effort was at work, and was very rapidly developed by a civil influence the moment that isolation ceased with the coming of the Normans.

Hardham and Boxgrove are almost the only examples which point by their sites to the economic work of the early monasteries, for they both lie along one of the old Roman roads; but both of them came comparatively late. Boxgrove was founded by the lords of Halnacker under Henry I., Hardham was later still. Robertsbridge, also a development of the central Middle Ages, may be cited as an example of the monks opening up wild country, but Battle was quite artificial, the result

of a vow paid and of the accidental site of a battle. Moreover, Battle, thus artificial, was by far the wealthiest of all. At the time of the dissolution Hammond, the last abbot (who surrendered with great pusillanimity to Henry VIII., and against whom the gravest charges have lain), gave up revenues of £1000 a year in the currency of the times—far more than £10,000 of our money. Boxgrove itself could only count about one hundred and fifty pounds.

The priory of Tortington, next to Arundel, is interesting in the history of England for reasons already mentioned, but it was not wealthy. Almost every other foundation, as the Dominicans of Chichester or Winchelsea, or those we have previously noted at Arundel, or the Franciscans of Winchester and Lewes, or those near the north gate of Chichester, or the Carmelites of New Shoreham, or the Friars of Rye, are connected with towns and do not therefore concern the development of the county.

So far we have been dealing with the historic basis upon which Sussex, like every other part of England, has been built.

We have seen that upon the prehistoric origin of which we know hardly anything came Rome. We have seen that the Italian race laid down the bed upon which all the rest was to rise—a bed, firm, hard, and even, like their own concrete. It was a process occupying in this island some four hundred years.

Upon Britain, as upon every other western province, fell the barbarian invasions of the fifth century. We have seen that they were somewhat more severe here than in other provinces, and that Sussex in particular was swept clean by them, not indeed of her race, but of her religion and her civilisation. The darkness resultant upon this catastrophe lasted for little more than a hundred years, but in that hundred years everything which gives dignity to mankind had disappeared, and the countryside, from Romney Marsh westward away to Chichester Haven, had gone savage. We have seen that it was slowly re-Christianised and recivilised, but that the planting of good stems upon such a devastated soil was for long a difficult and an unfruitful business. The mission of St. Wilfrid coincides with the close of the eighth century. It is not till the middle of the eleventh that Sussex really re-enters the European unity; it is not till the close of it that the influence of that unity begins to be largely felt after the Norman Conquest.

Two hundred and fifty years pass, during which the social development of England and of Sussex keeps the main lines laid down by the Conquest; the central government is still strong, the conception of tenure still weighs upon the wealthy class, and all men are responsible somewhere to some lord. Briefly, the mediæval system is during that period alive; here, as in northern France. And this island and northern France form, between them, until the close of the thirteenth century, the heart of Christendom. It is in them that arise the great philosophic discussions of the new universities, the Gothic architecture, the feudal scheme, the true co-operative industry of the mediæval manor.

For as long as that society could endure, that society was organised; and in Sussex the organisation, or, to use a better word, the sense of authority, is to be discovered in the great “Rape” overlordships, Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, Arundel, and Chichester, whose growth has been already sketched.

It so happened that that mediæval system grew old and failed.

The period of time between its failure and the present day is comparatively short, as the history of mankind goes. Its break-down is only apparent to the historian with the middle of the fourteenth century; it is not suspected by its own victims till the middle of the fifteenth. We are to-day but in the beginning of the twentieth. It may be said, roughly, that four hundred years of change alone separate us from that organic unity which had survived for fifteen hundred years from the civilisation that the Mediterranean brought us. We feel a world away from that organic unity of the Middle Ages, because these last four centuries have been so full of an active intelligence and of an increasing material knowledge, that these take up nearly the whole horizon of our minds; but our detachment is but apparent and illusory. At bottom our morals, in so far as they are permanent, our conception of civic life, our modern appetite for economic justice, are all rooted in the Middle Ages; and the more a modern man learns of them the more he feels that they are his native place.

The process of disintegration which the mediæval system suffered took in Britain a peculiar form, and in this most typical district of Britain, in Sussex, that form is clearly to be traced. The village, which was the unit of mediæval life, was essentially co-operative. As the segregation of individual industry arose, either the lord was certain

to become, from the head official of a corporation, a proprietor of the whole, or the villein, his tenant, was bound to become, from a member of a co-operative society, a proprietor of his part. There was not room for both. Elsewhere, in all northern France, and to some extent in the valley of the Rhine, the break-up of the mediæval system is the attack of the peasant upon his lord. It is (spread over a much longer period) something like the campaign which the Irish have inaugurated in our own time. It is a movement towards peasant proprietorship.

In England the development is very different. Feudalism in England, even when it was highly organised, as in Sussex, had to fight against a force which is almost inherent in the soil. For that force it is difficult to find a name, though it is a tendency clearly observable in the whole of English history. It may, perhaps, best be defined as the tendency of the English village group to submit to one lord, coupled with the lack of any tendency among these lords to coalesce under a superior. The system is essentially oligarchic, and its foundations were laid in the natural crystallisation of society during the anarchy of the Anglo-Saxon centuries. With his inheritance of law weakened, and his memory of a protecting government destroyed, the small man had not the wit or the courage to fight against the big man; hence the English squire. The big men had not the necessity forced upon them to unite in defence of an antique civilisation and a strong Roman tradition; hence the permanent insecurity and ultimate abasement of the English monarchy.

The latter of these two forces you see at work continually in the history of England during that space which lies between the Norman Conquest and the Barons’ Wars, when the attempt to govern from a centre was made and failed. The village aristocracy is always stronger than the Crown, and in some sense expresses a national action against the Crown. At first this aristocracy merely supported the barons (who were their nominal overlords) in the joint attack upon monarchy, but as the centuries pass the overlords themselves lose their hegemony. At last, round about the period of the Reformation, the lords of single manors, the squires, become completely independent, and their final, wholly successful effort matures when the Tudors are no longer there with their violent personalities to defend the symbol, the remaining symbol, of a central authority.

The Stuarts break down. The squires arm. The Crown is defeated. A king is beheaded. From thence onward a process which was easily apparent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which had taken on strength with the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth, which had become of further importance with the large transfers of land at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, is completed. The seventeenth century sees in Sussex, as throughout England, the final victory of the village landlords, their complete possession of the soil and of the people who dwell upon it, and their complete independence from any authority over them.

There are many brief historical surveys which illustrate the rise of the landed families. Among the easiest for a general reader to take, and also the most instructive, is the list of the public offices of the county. We have a fairly complete calendar of the sheriffs from the purely feudal times to our own, and there we may trace the dignity falling more and more into the hands of county men. The local patriotism and its result, the strong local oligarchy, which are between them the warp and the woof of England, are exhibited here at one glance. The names mentioned are not always those of sheriffs for Sussex alone, especially in the earlier times; but their names and their places of origin are significant.

We begin that list not quite a hundred years after the Conquest, in the reign of Henry II. The names are drawn from all over England. They are merely royal officers and they do not concern us. But as the Middle Ages come to their end, the names which we can identify as those of the local gentry begin to tell. You get, just at the beginning of the Wars of the Roses, the Ashburnhams and the Stricklands. In Edward IV.’s reign you find for the first time a Goring (who was then not even a knight). You get the Gainsfords of Crowhurst, and the Coombes (honoured name!), presumably of Coombes in the vale of the Adur. Just before the Reformation the Oxenbridges of Brede and the Dawtreys of Petworth, who founded Hardham Priory, and whose name proceeds from the high banks (“d’Haute Rive”) of the water meadows of Arun. You get again that good Sussex name, the Palmers of Angmering, and so on to the Civil Wars. There are further Gorings and Morleys, also a Glynde, and, just before the struggle, a bishop a knight of Parham.

It is after the Restoration, of course, when the

victory of the squires was complete and final, that the habit becomes fixed, and that you find (until quite recent times) nothing but Sussex names in the great roll of the sheriffs. There is a sort of gap under William and Mary, who were usurpers and disturbed the order of England; but with Anne reasonable things returned. The names of Blunt and Shelley appear, which still adorn the county; and under the Hanoverians, the Bartelotts of Stopham, and many another family which still holds land within the centre and in the west of the county, are to be found upon the rolls.

Not until the Reform Bill does the tradition begin to change. Then you find a Curzon coming in out of nowhere; and since then, one must dare say, many another man who is simply rich, and who simply happens to have settled upon Sussex land.

We may now turn to examine in detail those Sussex families which have become bound up with the history of the county; some of them originally territorial; some of them professional, acquiring wealth in their professions, and achieving territorial rank; many of them passing from one part of the county to another, but all remaining a true framework for the countryside.

Alongside with them we shall be able to trace a most deplorable vicissitude in the ownership of certain manors which has, most unfortunately, not ceased to-day, but has rather increased, and which very seriously menaces the future integrity of the county.

It is impossible, of course, to give a complete survey of the process in these few pages, but the consideration of a few typical manors and, after that, of a few typical families will suffice to fill in that general impression of the county which it is the object of this book to convey.

Consider, for example, the Manor of Cuckfield, and see the way in which the squirearchy develops. One may presume that throughout the true Middle Ages it preserved at least a semblance of depending upon the overlordship of the Rape, and the Fitz Alans can count themselves its masters.

But as the Lancastrian usurpation breaks the great families a local consideration comes in. In the eighteenth year of Henry VI. the manor was divided between four co-heiresses, and so remained divided into four pieces (each still held by great families, but each holding the germ of a future squire in its small limits), until the last half of the sixteenth century, when two men, Bowyer and Covert, introduce (in the sixteenth and twenty-third

years of Elizabeth respectively) a new stock upon the old land.

Within a hundred years there comes in one Sigerson, perhaps of the middle class, a Commissioner of the Navy; he buys the estate, his family hold it throughout the eighteenth century, and are the principal owners at this day.

This tendency of lands to remain in the same hands till the close of the Middle Ages, and then to be bought up by a new race of squires, may be traced in many another parish. There is Graffham, which does not change hands until after the Armada, when a certain Garter of London buys it; it then passes by the marriage of an heiress to the first of the Sargeants; an heiress of the Sargeants after many generations marries the man who was afterwards Cardinal Manning; another heiress (by this time the family held Lavington close by) marries Wilberforce, the bishop, and, right in our own time, his son sells it to a Scotch distiller.

Or consider again Madehurst which, until the reign of Elizabeth, holds of the Arundel earls; then one Dixse has it in fee; then it passes to the Kemps, and they sell it to Sir George Thomas (whose family sold it again), after which it passes by a second sale in 1825 to John Smith; and at last we see it in the middle and end of the nineteenth century in the hands of a manufacturing family who had chosen to assume the ancient name of Fletcher.

Eartham (to quote another example) went to King Henry VIII. in exchange for Michelham Priory; in the middle of the eighteenth century a Chichester man bought it, one Hayley; a generation later, Huskisson, the politician; then the Milbankes; and then again, quite recently, a man whose name is connected with a custard powder.

Singleton went down traditionally until the Reformation; nay, till that year after the Armada, when Graffham also had slipped; then, in 1589, it changes hands, passing from a noble to a squire. It remained in his family till the beginning of the eighteenth century; it is sold and re-sold, passing from hand to hand. Within present memory first a squire, and then a northern Quaker, and at last a wealthy racing family have held it, one after the other.

As might be imagined, the Church lands, their lineage abruptly torn apart at the Reformation, suffered fates even more revolutionary, and produced a squirearchy even more tenacious by its

wealth, and even less attached by tradition to the county of Sussex. Thus Newtimber, which had come down from Doomsday, is seized by Thomas Cromwell. The King chucks it to Anne of Cleves; then you find a Darrell in possession; then a Bellingham (holding of Lord Abergavenney in the sixteenth year of Charles I.) It is left to one Woodcock, whose daughter, after the Restoration, marries a Cust; and then, following the universal fate, it is sold to a yeoman of Poynings, one Osborne, whose grandson in 1741 sells it to a Newnham, whose grandson, again, early in the last century, sells it to a Gordon, etc.

An historian might make many exceptions. The fortified places have most of them held out (as it is their nature to hold out) against change. We have already pointed out that Bramber and Arundel have had a continuous tenure. Bosham goes right down from the confiscation after the Conquest to the nineteenth century without alienation. But take Sussex land as a whole: the sixteenth century first and the Restoration afterwards have dug an impassable gulf.

It is pleasant for those who love certitude to pass from such vicissitudes to something allied to the tradition of the land, but more permanent than it: the tradition of the owners of the land. It is pleasant to note the continuity of certain Sussex families, their origin, and their grip upon the soil.

Thus the Shelleys have not only glorified Sussex by producing at the end of their line her chief poet, but have also welded themselves into the soil of this happy county.

Shelley, whose great name might almost add something to the splendour of the land upon which he was born, will be remembered because that birth of his was next to Horsham. The story of his family will show how widely it was spread over Sussex land, and how worthy it was of inheriting such skies and such a landscape as could produce a master of verse.

The name, oddly enough, is from Kent; indeed there has been, since the centuries after the Conquest, a continual movement westward from Kent into Sussex of which the Shelleys are but one example.

Long before family names arose, while men were still called by their Christian names and their land was mentioned after them, the men of Shelley in Kent were lords of Shelley. They were there in the end of the thirteenth century, they were there until the middle of the fourteenth; at that epoch

one John Shelley went westward, for the good of England. The Lancastrian usurpation, that watershed in our social history, is apparent here. John Shelley is returned for the Commons of Rye, just after Agincourt. He had a son who went still farther west, and, coming to Mitchegrove, married the daughter and the heiress of the lord of that place, a certain John, who took his name, as was right, from his own land. This settlement of the family endured through the Reformation. After this latter date the Shelleys marry into Buckhurst; still further on before the Civil Wars they exchange their Warwickshire lands for further Sussex holdings; in the eighteenth century one finds them marrying into Maresfield. Already they had a hold upon Findon. Up on St. Leonard’s Forest you find their name in one of the first of the ploughed lands which open that deserted belt, and they remain to-day Sussex in name, place, and position.

To take but one other example, and that of a very different kind, the Blunts of Crabbet Park are Sussex, though of a later stock. Here also we have a westward movement coming in with the last migration of the squires. For Thomas Blunt (a Collector of Customs in Kent) had a grandson, Elyas, fixed at Bolney; his name is not without significance of the time in which he lived. This man married the heiress of New Buildings after the Restoration, and perhaps in the Civil Wars the family acquired those waste spaces of the Crown which now make up the larger part of their holdings. At any rate that family has produced at the end of its line to-day another poet, and again a poet of Sussex.

The list might be multiplied, but it will be of little purpose to develop it in so short a summary as this. It is our purpose rather to show how, until quite recent years, Sussex lands ran into the hands of a group of families who perpetually interchanged their holdings, and who yet remained full of the county air, until there came that modern diversion by which so much of the county has fallen to those who have nothing of its spirit, and who only come into it as into a sort of park, for their momentary pleasure.

For until the last two generations nothing was more tenacious than the Sussex squire to his soil. Long after the Reform Bill, nay, right into our own time, Sussex land was not sold to outsiders, and Sussex social conservatism was unbroken. The moral health of its villages was keen and singular; the squire was of no excessive wealth, the farmer

securing his tenancy, the labourer glad of his wage, and living on from grandfather to grandson, secure also of his position in the village. The old arts, which are the test of vitality in any commonwealth, survived—to this day there are villages where the thatcher can thatch as he can in no other part of England; for instance, in Walberton he can do so. To this day Sussex retains in some of her remoter hamlets, for instance in Bury, the true Broadcast Sower.

There is a phase of English history which all lovers of England look back upon with regret; it is a phase whose complete literary expression is to be found in Gray’s Elegy; it was in the purpose of whatever guides this county that such a phase should not be very long-lived, but while it lasted perhaps the happiness of the English countrysides was higher than it had been before within our historical memory, or will be again within the limits of our continuous tradition. Of this happiness it can be almost proved that Sussex presented the chief example, but just because the county had reached such a goal it was destined to a measure of change.

When Sussex had fallen into what seemed a permanent phase of large agricultural estates, held by the most contented gentry and tenantry in England, there fell upon this state of affairs a foretaste of what was to happen throughout the county with the great economic revolution of the nineteenth century; a great town began to arise and to grow with startling rapidity in one devoted portion of the countryside.

It is curious that Sussex, whose character and whose pleasure it has always been to live its own life, and to stand apart from the development of the rest of the island, or at least to develop only after the rest of the island has made its particular experiments, and has proved its experiments wise,—it is curious that Sussex should in this one case, and that a most important one, have gone before the rest of England. For Sussex was the county to develop the great watering-places and the great centres of population (as apart from the centres of industry) which first created, then were so vastly increased by, the railway system.

The reason is, of course, not far to seek. Sussex possessed the nearest coast-line to London, and presented that coast in an aspect most attractive to Londoners.

No very considerable harbours disfigure it. The trade with France was not a trade of such a

volume as that which has created Liverpool or long ago created Bristol. It was a busy, small agricultural trade.

Again, all along the coastal plain there is a beach; and a beach, when people once begin to take their pleasure by the sea, is a necessity for that pleasure.

Again, the line to this coast was close and direct. Every one who has bicycled or walked from London to the Kentish shores knows what a different task it is compared to a half-day’s run to the South Coast—the Sussex Coast is the “South Coast” for London, and the only one.

The first town to be developed in this manner was Brighton, and Brighton was not so much created by the fashion of the Prince Regent as by the fact of its proximity to London. It is the nearest point which Londoners can reach when they desire to enjoy the sea. It grew up in a manner to be paralleled nowhere else in England.

There are other characters in connection with the extension of this great town far more remarkable than the rapidity of its growth or the vastness of its population, as, for example, that it has affected to so slight a degree the neighbouring country around it; still the contemporaries of its growth were more struck by its rapidity than by any other feature. It began as a fishing town of 2000 souls. At the close of the last century it already counted 5000, in the year 1850 it measured 40,000—all this before the railway. When the effect of the railway was at its height, before the common use of the bicycle or the motor car, the development of Brighton was the most characteristically modern impress which the nineteenth century had made upon the landscape and nature of the county. It retains this pre-eminence in our own generation, but in a degree which is very probably to be lessened.

Somewhat later the other coast towns began to develop, and so long as the railway controlled that development, their growth was regular and almost according to a set law. Fashion or the doctors would recommend some point upon the coast. The long coastal railway from Brighton to Portsmouth afforded a station at the place, and the town increased in regular fashion, not with the station as the centre, but as the point from which branches spread out to the sea, so that these towns all more or less resemble a tree spreading from the railway station, and trippers hurrying from that station to the beach are like the deployment of a regiment