PART II

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SUSSEX

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

[Illustration: FARMHOUSE, LEYS GREEN]

[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.

[Illustration: NEAR PEVENSEY]

[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

[Illustration: LYCH GATE, PULBOROUGH]

[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.

[Illustration: PULBOROUGH]

[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

[Illustration: HARTFIELD--THE INN]

[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.

[Illustration: EWHURST]

[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

[Illustration: MALLING MILL]

[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,

[Illustration: FISHBOURNE MILL]

[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

[Illustration: ST. MARY’S CHURCH, RYE]

[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

[Illustration: FITTLEWORTH VILLAGE]

[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

[Illustration: GROOMBRIDGE]

[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

[Illustration: BOSHAM--MILL BRIDGE]

[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

[Illustration: WEST HAM]

[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.

[Illustration: LEWES CASTLE]

[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,

[Illustration: GARDEN OF THE MOATED HOUSE, GROOMBRIDGE]

[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

[Illustration: PEVENSEY CASTLE]

[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!

It is doubtful whether anything of Roman structure remains in Pevensey,

though much of the material used in the castle is Roman, and though the

towers of that fortification are round. It is enough to remark, that

after the long night of the Saxon period the town shared in the general

renaissance of South England which followed the Norman Conquest. To give

but one indication of this: it trebled in population in twenty years.

There is little doubt that at this period, that is, throughout the end

of the eleventh century, the whole of the twelfth, and beginning of the

thirteenth, the harbour lay beneath the mound of the present ruins. The

contour lines, slight as they are in elevation, and the nature of the

soil are enough to prove this; nor is it difficult, as one stands on the

height of Pevensey Castle, to reproduce the scene which must

[Illustration: CLIFFS NEAR EASTBOURNE]

[Sidenote: PEVENSEY TOWN]

have presented itself to the eye of a man living six hundred years ago

when he looked northwards and eastwards at high tide. The great marshy

flats of the Level were a shallow bay covered by the sea, out of which

bay there rounded in towards him a harbour protected from every side

except the north-east, and even from that side exposed to no long drive

of the weather. This harbour, which was naturally shallow, was probably

deepened artificially, whether before or during the Roman occupation; it

remained serviceable until past the close of that twelfth century which

produced so many great changes in the physical condition as in the

political constitutions of Western Europe. Thus Pevensey is one of the

first of the lesser towns of England to receive its borough charter. It

gets that charter in the ninth year of King John, and it counts as being

politically the most important of the Cinque Ports, until there falls

upon it the fate which has fallen upon every south-country harbour in

turn. It was destroyed by that upon which it had lived, the sea. The

beginning of the disaster, a mixture of drift silting up the harbour and

of encroachment and breaking-down of its defences, may be dated from the

middle of the thirteenth century, and after this date the decline

continues with such rapidity that before the end of the French wars

Pevensey is hardly a town. It has declined ever since.

You get in the Rape of Pevensey, as in that of Lewes, the universal

Sussex rule that the inhabited places are first found in the

neighbourhood of the sea. But this rule is modified in the case of

Pevensey Rape by the ironstone of the Eastern Weald. But for the

industry arising from the use of this the forest ridge of Ashdown would

have remained as lonely as that of St. Leonards. As it was, many places

upon either slope of the ridge are known to have been inhabited from the

earliest times; for instance, Mayfield, which may properly be regarded

as a foot-hill of Ashdown Forest, and as a part of the true Weald, is

connected with the name of St. Dunstan, and formed one of that

procession of ecclesiastical palaces which the See of Canterbury held

all along the centre of the county, and of which the last westward is

Slindon. Again, Rotherfield is, quite possibly, as old as Offa, or

older; at least, dues from that parish were claimed by the Monastery of

St. Denis near Paris, which dues were said to have been bequeathed by

Bertoald, one of Offa’s lieutenants, during the lifetime of Charlemagne,

and before the close of the eighth century. Frant, though we do not hear

of it by name

[Illustration: MAYFIELD]

[Sidenote: HASTINGS RAPE]

until much later, was undoubtedly of great antiquity, and formed a sort

of appendage to Rotherfield.

When, however, one gets over the empty ridge of Ashdown and south on to

the slope which looks at the Downs, the natural isolation of the Weald

is to be traced. Buxted, for instance, is not heard of before 1298,

though later it has the fine reputation of having cast the first cannon

ever made in England. Uckfield close by is of no importance until the

sixteenth century. When we turn to the sea coast, on the contrary,

everything at once proves the antiquity of settlements in that

neighbourhood. For example, you have discoveries at Alfriston, just

behind Beachy Head, of British coins; you have Hailsham, mentioned in

the Norman Survey; and on Mount Caburn, just above the Vale of Glynde,

are some of the most perfect prehistoric fortifications in the county.

The Rape of Hastings has, further, exceptions of its own, for here we

come to the narrow eastern end of the county where there is no long

hinterland of Weald to give us the normal development of the Sussex

Rape. But even here there is a trace of that slower rising of the inland

as compared with the sea-coast sites; thus Robertsbridge is the child of

a monastery of the central Middle Ages. Battle was so little known

until the great fight of 1066 that even its name appears in doubt at

that epoch. On the other hand, Crowhurst we know to have been held by

Harold. Bexhill is mentioned in Doomsday, and we know of the existence

of Winchelsea and of Rye at the same epoch.

The mention of these two towns cannot be allowed to pass without some

description of their fate as seaports.

Winchelsea, like Pevensey, contained, hooked in behind a peninsula of

land, a harbour protected from the prevailing south-westerly winds, and

here, as at Pevensey, it is possible to stand to-day and notice what

original opportunities must have led to the later and partly artificial

harbour. Its importance continued, as did that of Pevensey, into the

middle of the thirteenth century, when the first of its disasters began

in an overwhelming high tide. Rye is still a port, the port of the mouth

of the Rother; but what a port, only those know who have attempted to

make it even in the smallest of craft! Unless there should arise some

local industry which will make it worth while to dredge the river and

establish an expensive system of leading marks into its mouth, Rye

within another hundred years will be no more than Sandwich.

[Illustration: WINCHELSEA]

[Sidenote: HASTINGS TOWN]

The antiquity of the town of Hastings itself is among the most

interesting points in the history of Sussex, as is also the name which

the town bears. This name is usually ascribed to the pirate Hasting, or

Hasten, who ravaged the coast and later sailed up the Thames, at the

very end of the Danish invasions, during the reign of Alfred. It is at

any rate one of the very few important Sussex names which are certainly

and wholly Teutonic, and, if its derivation be exactly guessed, it is

the only place-name in the county derived from the name of a man, for

the derivation of Chichester from Cissa, the son of Aella, is obviously

as legendary as the derivation of Portsmouth from “Port,” or indeed any

other of the Anglo-Saxon myths.

The antiquarian does not discover at first sight what feature it was

which led to the early importance of Hastings. But, on a further

consideration, it may be conjectured that the rise of the place depended

upon the conjunction of two things not often found together, a safe

beach and a strong isolated hill.

Allusion has already been made, in the earlier part of this book, to the

importance of a good beach in early navigation. As common a way as any

other of making land, until the development of shipping in the later

Middle Ages, was that still adopted by our South Coast fishermen. The

vessels, though large, were of a shallow draft and of a broad beam; they

were run upon the beach with a careful choice of the right moment

between the breakers, and before the momentum of their “weigh” was

wholly spent, two or three hands standing ready forward had leapt into

the shallow water, and had prepared to direct the bows of the vessel

over some form of roller when the next sea should thrust her farther up

the shore. When once the bows had taken the roller above the sea line,

the rest was easy. The advancing seas would necessarily push the vessel

farther up the slope, and when a second or third roller had been placed

under the keel a dozen or so of the crew could move even a heavy vessel

up out of the way of the high tide. Nor would craft with so shallow a

section as those used in the Dark and early Middle Ages have careened

over to one side or another at all dangerously during the process of

beaching. But for this manœuvre to be successful a particular kind of

beach is required; the slope must be even, or one might damage one’s

vessel against an abrupt bulge of it. It must not be too steep, or the

rolling of the vessel will be too laborious for the crew. It must not be

too slight, or the distance along which the

[Illustration: THE STAR INN, ALFRISTON]

[Sidenote: MILITARY IMPORTANCE OF HASTINGS]

vessel has to be rolled will be too great to make the effort worth

while. In material it must be firm and hard--a quality which gave its

pre-eminence to the sand of Deal, for if it be shifty or sinking the

difficulty of beaching the boat may be insuperable.

Now all these characters are to be discovered in the shingle at

Hastings, and added to these is the presence of a strong and easily

fortified eminence.

The importance of this sort of refuge can easily be minimised by the

modern historian, but those acquainted with the conditions of an earlier

time will appreciate its value. A fortress now serves, as Napoleon well

put it, “to save time,” and serves little else in military purpose. In a

sense this has always been the chief value of a fortress, but when one

was dealing with smaller forces, more passionate and less constant in

motive than those of to-day, and far more easily disintegrated than is a

thoroughly civilised army, time was of far greater value in a campaign.

Again, the defence was easier with a smaller body of men on account of

the comparative inefficiency of projectiles, the comparative lack of

training of the assaulting infantry, and the pre-dominance of cavalry

tactics, between the fall of the Roman Empire and the invention of

fire-arms. It may be roughly asserted that the power of the defensive

behind properly constructed works grew to a maximum from the fifth to

the middle of the twelfth century, remained almost stationary till the

close of the thirteenth, and only slowly declined during the sieges of

the French wars in the succeeding hundred years.

Now under such conditions the importance of hills such as that of

Hastings was very great. Here a garrison could, properly commanded, hold

out almost indefinitely; it could, therefore, cover a landing or repel

an invasion; it could gather under its protection a large and increasing

population. The shape of the hill was precisely that required for

fortification in the Dark and Middle Ages. It is, in its best form, an

example of what you will find also at Chateau Gaillard in Normandy and,

to a lesser degree, at Lewes and Arundel in this same county of Sussex,

namely, a sort of peninsula or spur with a crowning summit of its own,

united with the hills behind it by a comparatively narrow neck, over

which assault should be impossible. In the modern sense and referring to

modern artillery, such positions are extremely bad, for they are

commanded by the higher range at their back; as Arundel is commanded by

the heights of the

[Illustration: HASTINGS--THE SHORE]

[Sidenote: MILITARY IMPORTANCE OF HASTINGS]

Park, Lewes by Mount Harry, and Chateau Gaillard by the woods locally

known as “La Ferme”; indeed, in the case of this latter castle the

conquest of Philip Augustus was largely due to the fact that missile

weapons, even in his age, were just within range of the castle from the

heights to the south and east. But though, under modern conditions, such

situations are bad, under the conditions of at least the eleventh and

early twelfth centuries, they were ideal. When William the Conqueror

held Hastings there were no methods by which projectiles of sufficient

strength could be thrown at the castle from the hills to the north-east,

though a hundred years later, by the time of the Third Crusade, and

later still, during the attack on the Norman castle already mentioned,

such weapons had been developed. One has but to stand on the platform of

the ruined stronghold of Hastings to see that, for at least the first

hundred years after the Conquest, the place must have been, under any

proper command, impregnable. And indeed we find attached to it in

Anglo-Saxon times the epithet “ceaster,” which is never given to any

place that has not been properly fortified, whether by the Romans or by

their successors.

This fortification of Hastings Hill leads one to mention two other

castles which lie within the Rape, and which are illustrative of a

feature to be discovered in Sussex alone among the English counties.

This feature is the presence of subsidiary castles to strengthen the

gates of the county, and to stand behind those principal castles whose

primary function it is to defend the entries into the land. These

subsidiary castles may be best explained to modern readers by using a

modern metaphor, and saying that they act as “half-backs” to the great

seaport castles of Sussex.

The seaport castles have already been mentioned; we will repeat the list

to refresh the reader’s memory: they are Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes,

Bramber, and Arundel.

Of these Lewes alone did not, so far as history knows, possess a

subsidiary castle to the north of it, and that for this sufficient

reason, that the road immediately north split eastward and westward, and

forced an army either to pass within striking distance of Hurstmanceaux

or within striking distance of Bramber, for the old road did not go over

the bleak and deserted ridge of Ashdown as the modern one does. And the

historic marches down south upon Lewes were undertaken in a

[Illustration: HURSTMONCEAUX CASTLE]

[Sidenote: THE SECONDARY CASTLES]

circuitous manner, as, for instance, that famous one of Henry III.,

which ended in the defeat of the King in 1264.

In the case of every other great defensive work a secondary work exists

behind it. Hastings has Bodiam, Pevensey has Hurtsmanceaux, Bramber has

Knepp (which has been more completely ruined than any of the others),

Arundel has Amberley. Hurtsmanceaux should logically fall into the Rape

of Pevensey, to which it strategically belongs. The accident of a river

course makes it fall into the Rape of Hastings, and on this account we

mention it here. The other castles will be dealt with in their proper

place under each Rape as we deal with it; for Knepp is in the Rape of

Bramber, and Amberley in that of Arundel.

As Moreton had been given the overlordship of Pevensey, the government

of its Rape, and many manors within it, and as Warren had been given

Lewes, so Bramber fell to Braose, and that great name still stands

written like a title over the history of this part of the county. The

castle itself and some few of the many manors with which the family was

richly endowed enjoyed a fate extremely rare in the case of English

land, and on account of its rarity the more pleasing, when it is

discovered; there has been a long and true continuity in their manorial

lordship. With the French this continuity was quite common up to the

Revolution, and to this day there are many French families, several

Italian, and a few German, who can trace their lineage and their

connection with particular portions of the soil well beyond the

crusading epoch and even to the ninth or early tenth century. But our

English aristocracy is exceedingly modern. The bulk of such few families

as boast any antiquity at all can barely trace themselves to the

Reformation; the mass of those who pose for lineage end in the mist of

the seventeenth century. Bramber and some of the De Braose lands had

better luck. For ten generations it remained in direct succession. When

this ended (much at the same time as the Lancastrian usurpation) in an

heiress, this heiress married a Mowbray, upon which family, almost

immediately afterward, was conferred the Duchy of Norfolk. Ten

successors, Mowbrays, held it in the direct line when, about a century

after the first change, and a generation before the Reformation, it

ended again in an heiress who married into the then undistinguished

family of Howard, whose various branches had been careful, above all

things, to increase their wealth by opportune

[Sidenote: BRAMBER RAPE]

alliances. To this new family the Duchy of Norfolk was soon conveyed,

and after another ten successors the De Braose inheritance of Bramber is

still to be found in their hands. It is a remarkable and a delightful

example of a succession unbroken by purchase.

The last sign of the ancient importance of Bramber lay in the fact that

it returned, until the Reform Bill, two members to Parliament as a

borough. It was then as it is now a small village, and there remained

then as there remains now of its ancient castle nothing but one vast

wall.

Here, as is the case throughout all the other Rapes, the parishes along

the sea coast or near it come earliest in history, and those of the

Weald come last. Thus Lancing is in Doomsday; so is Coombes; so is

Buttolphs (under Annington); Beeding is actually in Alfred’s will.

Shoreham, as we have seen, entered history hundreds of years before, and

Henfield is in the great Norman survey under the lordship of the Bishop

of Chichester; but as you go northwards the names begin to fail you.

Shipley, if we may judge by its church, was probably a development of

the next century. Horsham is first mentioned as a town of importance in

the thirteenth century, when it sends two members to the Parliament of

the twenty-third of Edward I. And little Rusper, up in the far north, we

do not hear of until there is mention of a convent of the same date. As

for the forest of St. Leonard’s we know that De Braose held it, but, no

more than in the case of Worth, is there any proof of its inhabitation

or even importance till a much later date.

The port of this Rape, Shoreham, has an interesting history as being yet

another of those many ports which the long history of Sussex has seen

decline. It lay so directly south of London, and, once communication was

established across the Weald, it was so excellent a port of

disembarkation for any one coming from the mouth of the Seine or any of

the Norman ports, that it maintained a very high political importance

right on into the fifteenth century. Thus it was the landing-place of

John when he returned to England after the death of his brother.

In the French wars under the third Edward it was assessed to furnish as

many ships as Plymouth and two more than Bristol or London. Shortly

after its decline began. That great bank of shingle, which is now

covered with a very unpleasant little town of iron bungalows, grew up

and obstructed

[Illustration: BODIAM CASTLE]

[Sidenote: SHOREHAM TOWN]

the issue of the river, so that to-day the mouth of the harbour is far

eastward of New Shoreham. The burgesses complained that they could no

longer pay the old taxes, the borough rights lingered on; but even these

at last disappeared in the eighteenth century, when the town was

disfranchised and the whole Rape was represented together in its stead.

Oddly enough it was at this very moment that the town began to revive;

the trade in coal proved useful to it; it became, before the railways,

the natural port for Brighton, which lies close by, and, year by year,

it gradually though somewhat slowly recovered its old position. It now

has probably as much trade as any other Sussex port except Newhaven,

though the bar is still difficult for vessels of any draft, and the

sharp turning at the entry of the harbour adds to the inconvenience of

that refuge, as does the narrowness of the river and the steepness of

its banks opposite the town itself.

Its gradual revival did not re-enfranchise it; the Rape still remained

the parliamentary unit to which it belonged, and the first member to sit

for that division was a Burrell of Knepp Castle.

With this name we get not only one of the famous Sussex squires, whose

position will be dealt with later, but the principal historian of the

county residing in one of its most ancient centres. The Burrells were

lawyers of Horsham who purchased Knepp in the second half of the

eighteenth century, a true Sussex family growing upon Sussex soil. The

founder of the present baronetcy collected all the new material which

has been worked in by subsequent writers into the history of the county.

Much of this is luckily preserved in the British Museum, but some parts,

unless the present writer is misinformed, disappeared during the recent

fire in the modern house of Knepp Castle.

Of the original fortification nothing remains but one little fragment in

the south of the estate to the right of the Ashington road. The land has

still one local distinction, however, in that it holds a sheet of water,

Knepp mill-pond, which is said to be the largest unbroken area of water

south of the Thames.

Next in order to the Rape of Bramber comes that of Arundel. Here again

the typical upgrowth of a Sussex Rape is modified by local conditions,

for the Weald at the northern end of this Rape has been traversed since

the beginning of our history by the great line of the Roman road.

Arundel Rape has therefore been always accessible from

[Illustration: ARUNDEL CASTLE]

[Sidenote: ARUNDEL RAPE]

the Thames valley, and the Thames valley from it. On this account there

occurs, as one might imagine, a very early and very thorough development

of all its habitable portion. A mere list of the places mentioned in

Doomsday in this Rape, places which are still most of them quite small,

and have never supported any great number of inhabitants, is surprising.

Some, such as Arundel itself, and Climping and Felpham, go back to

Anglo-Saxon times. One, Amberley, counts as part of the original

foundation of the Church at the close of the eighth century, and

Lyminster had a convent before the arrival of the Normans, while

Littlehampton was certainly a port before the same date. Meanwhile a

rapid survey of the names appearing in Doomsday, all within a walk of

the sea coast, are sufficient to show how thoroughly the Arun valley,

the subsidiary valley of the Western Rother, and the coastal plain west

of the mouth of the river, had developed before the close of the

eleventh century.

Thus Barnham (to begin with the flat lands along the sea) is in

Doomsday; so are Eastergate, Walberton, Tortington, where later was the

famous priory which preserved the early records of the mayoralty of

London, and in whose destruction the chief monuments of London history

were lost. Binsted is in Doomsday. Turning to the slope of the Downs we

find Goring is in Doomsday. Angmering below it, and on the belt of good

loam land to the north of them Sutton, Barlavington, Duncton, Burton,

Stopham, and Petworth are all to be found, as are Bury, Bignor, and

Hardham, where later was to spring up the priory of the Hauterives. On

the far side of the river Parham and Burpham are mentioned, so is

Storrington, and on the river itself Pulborough; while even such lonely

nooks of the Downs as Upper Waltham come into the Norman Survey.

All this fell to the Montgomerys. Very shortly afterwards, by the

failure of that family, the guardianship of the castle at Arundel and

the headship of the Rape went to the De Albinis; to them succeeded the

Fitz Alans, and to them again, when they ended in an heiress, succeeded

the ubiquitous and ever watchful family of Howard, who snapped up that

inheritance before it could fall to any other, and the new Duchy of

Norfolk added not only the Rape of Arundel to that of Bramber, but also

a sort of headship over the Rape of Chichester,--for Chichester had gone

with Arundel in the original grant to Montgomery.

[Illustration: AMBERLEY CHALK PITS]

[Sidenote: ARUNDEL TOWN]

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

[Illustration: MIDHURST--KNOCK HUNDRED ROW]

[Sidenote: ARUNDEL TOWN]

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.

[Illustration: AMBERLEY CHURCH]

[Sidenote: HOUGHTON BRIDGE]

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

[Sidenote: THE RAPE OF CHICHESTER]

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

[Illustration: MERMAID STREET, RYE]

[Sidenote: ITS ECCLESIASTICAL CHARACTER]

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

[Illustration: SINGLETON]

[Sidenote: SCILLY SUSSEX]

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

[Illustration: GATEHOUSE, BATTLE ABBEY]

[Sidenote: THE MONASTERIES]

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.

[Illustration: WINCHELSEA MILL]

[Sidenote: THE RISE OF THE SQUIRES]

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

[Sidenote: THE RISE OF THE SQUIRES]

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.

[Illustration: GLYNDE]

[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX FAMILIES]

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

[Illustration: ANGMERING MILL]

[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX FAMILIES]

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

[Illustration: NEAR HARDHAM]

[Sidenote: GRAFFHAM AND LAVINGTON]

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

[Illustration: MICKLEHAM PRIORY]

[Sidenote: NEWTIMBER]

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

[Illustration: THE MERMAID INN, RYE]

[Sidenote: THE SHELLEYS]

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

[Illustration: BURY CHURCH]

[Sidenote: SUSSEX JUST PAST]

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

[Sidenote: THE WATERING TOWNS]

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

[Sidenote: THE WATERING TOWNS]

from column into line. These towns are, of course, stretched out along

the beach; for their separate and successive organisation, the continual

presence behind them of the coastal plain, with its railway parallel to

the shore, has afforded admirable opportunities. That plain from

Brighton to Bosham is perfectly flat; the crossing of the rivers has

presented the only obstacle, and that obstacle was insignificant. The

railway could run pretty well in a straight line and build up the towns

along the sea.

Even to-day the villages are linking up with the towns. Rustington is

full of bricks. Rottingdean, for twenty years a sort of suburb, has now

long been full of painters and others. A curious collection of bungalows

has sprung up on the long pebbly beach which shuts out the Adur from the

sea. Opposite these barracks lies Lancing; and even upon the extremity

of old Selsea a new settlement, now nourished by a light railway from

Chichester, is arising. At Seaford, which is saved a little by its

hills, the same attempt at rapid building is made.

There is one feature in this string of houses all along the coast of the

county which Sussex men note with a pleasure not unmixed with malice. It

is this, that while places of absolutely no commercial use and of no

historical importance in the growth of the county are thus gradually

being turned into appendages of London (so that all the way from Beachy

Head to Chichester Harbour you have within the space of some fifty miles

at least sixteen miles of houses), yet the places characteristically

Sussex, the places upon the sea-line, which have gone to the building up

of the county, and in which the population naturally gathered, continue

to resist with extraordinary tenacity.

You can do nothing with Newhaven except leave it a port. Littlehampton

refuses to be the pleasure ground that its landlord desires it to be.

Bosham is still the ancient harbour and village which its history

demands that it should be. Shoreham will not consent to become a lesser

Worthing or a second Brighton, and this is the more remarkable from the

fact that these harbour towns and villages are geographically more in

touch with London than those other towns whose special character it is

to lie sheltered by the hills and far from the gaps by which a railway

could approach them from the north.

One may discover precisely the same state of affairs upon the eastern

coast of the county

[Sidenote: THE WATERING TOWNS]

beyond Beachy Head. Here, for example, is the enormous development of

Eastbourne, in a place which was useless for sailors, but sheltered from

the winds by the neighbouring hill. Bexhill has increased along a beach

which was not used until speculation had built the new town. Pevensey

between them, upon its flat inland, is still deserted.

To this list Hastings is a very considerable exception, because its

beach and hill made it during the Middle Ages, and for very different

reasons to-day, a necessary sea-town. But, with the exception of

Hastings, every other town follows a general rule, that the new growth

of watering-places along the south coast is extraneous.

This long series of new towns grates upon men who have known and loved

the county throughout their lives. There is little of Sussex about them;

they have not the Sussex method of building nor any of the Sussex

industries. Even their permanent population is largely drawn from other

parts of England, and you do not hear the full warm accent of the south

country often enough in their streets. The only consolation which the

county can give itself as it watches this increasing line of new

buildings is that, a mile or two behind them, their very presence seems

to be forgotten.

A closer observer has another consolation, which is that the new methods

of communication are perhaps beginning to check the tendency which

existed throughout the nineteenth century to over-populate the sea

coast. If men, foreign to the place, are trying to spoil the Weald, at

least they are applying a counter-irritant to their too great success in

spoiling the coastal plain, and in the Weald they have a larger area

over which to spread their limited faculties for evil.

It is even possible that the power which the county has shown itself

possessed of for so many centuries to digest and to absorb new-comers,

will save it altogether from these latter invasions--possible, but

doubtful. Then the descendants of those who now own Brighton, Worthing,

and the rest, the children of the men who build villas on Crowboro’ top,

and the heirs of the new-comers who have purchased, one would think, at

least a third of the great old houses under the Downs, will be worthy of

the soil which their ancestors certainly did not understand, and the

historical development of Sussex will continue.

It is more likely that that development has already come to an

unfruitful end.

[Illustration: FITTLEWORTH WATER MILL]