naturally affected Sussex, as one of its component portions. Even under
the Empire, however, the county remained singularly separate. The
Romans built two strong fortresses at Anderida and Regnum, Pevensey and
Chichester, to guard the two Gwents or lowland plains, where the shore
shelves slowly to seaward; and they ran one of their great roads across
the coastwise tract, from Dover to the Portus Magnus (now Porchester),
near Portsmouth; but they left Sussex otherwise very much to its own
devices. We know that the Regni were still permitted to keep their
native chief, who probably exercised over his tribesmen somewhat the
same subordinate authority which a Rájput raja now exercises under the
British government. Here, again, we see the natural result of the
isolation of Sussex. The Romans ruled directly in the open plains of
the Yorkshire Ouse and the Thames, as we ourselves rule in the Bengal
Delta, the Doáb, and the Punjáb; but they left a measure of
independence to the native princes of south Wales, of Sussex, and of
Cornwall, as we ourselves do to the native rulers in the deserts of
Rájputana, the inaccessible mountains of Nipal, and the aboriginal hill
districts of Central India.
When the Roman power began to decay, the outlying possessions were the
first to be given up. The Romans had enslaved and demoralised the
provincial population; and when they were gone, the great farms tilled
by slave labour under the direction of Roman mortgagee-proprietors lay
open to the attacks of fresh and warlike barbarians from beyond the
sea. How early the fertile east coasts of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and
East Anglia may have fallen a prey to the Teutonic pirates we cannot
say. The wretched legends, indeed, retailed to us by Gildas, Bæda, and
the English Chronicle, would have us believe that they were colonised
at a later period; but as they lay directly in the path of the
marauders from Sleswick, as they were certainly Teutonised very
thoroughly, and as no real records survive, we may well take it for
granted that the long-boats of the English, sailing down with the
prevalent north-east winds from the wicks of Denmark, came first to
shore on these fertile coasts. After they had been conquered and
colonised, the Saxon and Jutish freebooters began to look for
settlements, on their part, farther south. One horde, led, as the
legend veraciously assures us, by Hengest and Horsa, landed in Thanet;
another, composed entirely of Saxons, and under the command of a
certain dubious Ælle, came to shore on the spit of Selsea. It was from
this last body that the county took its newer name of Suth-Seaxe, Suth
Sexe, or Sussex. Let us first frankly narrate the legend, and then see
how far it may fairly be rationalised.
In 477, says the English Chronicle--written down, it must be
remembered, from traditional sources, four centuries later, at the
court of Alfred the West Saxon--in 477, Ælle and his three sons, Cymen,
Wlencing, and Cissa, came to Britain in three ships, and landed at the
stow that is cleped Cymenes-ora. There that ilk day they slew many
Welshmen, and the rest they drave into the wood hight Andredes-leah. In
485, Ælle, fighting the Welsh near Mearcredes Burn, slew many, and the
rest he put to flight. In 491, Ælle, with his son Cissa, beset
Andredes-ceaster, and slew all that therein were, nor was there after
one Welshman left. Such is the whole story, as told in the bald and
simple entries of the West Saxon annalist, A more dubious tradition
further states that Ælle was also Bretwalda, or overlord, of all the
Teutonic tribes in Britain.
And now let us see what we can make of this wholly unhistorical and
legendary tale. Whether there ever was a South Saxon king named Ælle we
cannot say; but that the earliest English pirate fleet on this coast
should have landed near Selsea is likely enough. The marauders would
not land near the Romney marshes or the Pevensey flats, where the great
fortresses of Lymne and Anderida would block their passage; and they
could not beach their keels easily anywhere along the cliff-girt coast
between Beachy Head and Brighton; so they would naturally sail along
past the marshland and the chalk cliffs till they reached the open
champaign shore near Chichester. Cymenes-ora, where they are said to
have landed, is now Keynor on the Bill of Selsea; and Selsea itself, as
its name (correctly Selsey) clearly shows us, was then an island in the
tidal flats. This was just the sort of place which the English pirates
loved, for all tradition represents their first settlements as effected
on isolated spots like Thanet, Hurst Castle, Holderness, and
Bamborough. Thence they would march upon Regnum, the square Roman town
at the harbour head, and reduce it by storm, garrisoned as it doubtless
was by a handful of semi-Romanised Welshmen or Britons. The town took
the English name of Cissanceaster, or Chichester. Moreover, all around
the Chichester district, we still find a group of English clan
villages, with the characteristic patronymic termination _ing_. Such
are East and West Wittering, Donnington, Funtington, Didling, and
others. It is _vraisemblable_ enough that the little strip of very low
coast between Hayling Island and the Arun may have been the first
original South Saxon colony. Nor is it by any means impossible that the
names of Keynor and Chichester Cymenes-ora and Cissanceaster--may still
enshrine the memory of two among the old South Saxon freebooters.
The tradition of a battle at Mearcredes Burn, when the Welsh were again
defeated, may refer to an advance by which, a few years later, the
South Saxon pirates pushed eastward along the coast, and occupied the
strip of shore as far as Brighton, together with the fertile valley of
the Lewes Ouse. In the first-named district we find a large group of
English Clan villages, including Patching, Poling, Angmering, Goring,
Worthing, Tarring, Washington, Lullington, Blatchingden, Ovingdean,
Rottingdean, and many others. Amongst them is one which has clearly
given rise to the name of Ælle's third son, and that is Lancing.
Unfortunately for the legend, we must decide that this was really the
settlement of an English clan of Lancingas, as Washington was the _tun_
or enclosure of the Weasingas, and Beddingham was the _ham_ or home of
the Beddingas. Around Lewes, in like manner, we find Tarring, Malling,
Piddinghoe, Bletchington, and others; while in the valley just to the
east we have ten or eleven such names as Lullington, Wilmington,
Folkington, and Littlington. These districts, I imagine, represent the
second advance of the English conquerors.
Finally, fourteen years after the first landing, the South Saxons
crossed the Downs and attacked Anderida. The Roman walls of the great
fortress were thick and strong, as their remains, built over by the
Norman Castle, still show; but they were defended by half-trained
Welsh, who could not withstand the English onset. With the fall of
Anderida, the native power was broken for ever, 'nor was there after
one Welshman left.' The English tribe of the Hastingas settled at
Hastings; and the South Saxons were now supreme from marsh to marsh.
But did they really exterminate the native Celt-Euskarian population? I
venture to say, no. Some no doubt, especially the men, they slew; but
the women and children, as even Mr. Freeman admits, were probably
spared in large numbers. Even of the men, many doubtless became slaves
to the Saxon lords; while others maintained themselves in isolated
bands in the Weald. To this day the Euskarian type of humanity is not
uncommon among the Sussex peasantry, and all the rivers still bear the
Celtic names of Arun, Adur, Ouse, and Calder. That there was 'no
Welshmen left' is only another way of saying that the armed Welsh
resistance ceased. The Romanised Britons became English churls and
serfs--nay, the very name for a serf in ordinary conversation was Weala
or Welshman. The population received a new element--the English
Saxons--but it was not completely changed. The Weorthingas and Goringas
simply became masters of the lands formerly held by Roman owners; and
the cabins of their British serfs still clustered around the wooden
hall of the English lords.
Nevertheless, Sussex is one of the most thoroughly Teutonised counties
in England. The proportion of Saxon blood is very marked: light hair
and blue eyes, together with the broad and short English skull, are
common even among the peasantry. The number of English Clan names
noticed by Mr. Kemble in the towns and villages of Sussex is 68 as
against 60 in almost equally Teutonic Kent, 48 in Essex, 21 in largely
Celtic Dorset, 6 in Cumberland, 2 in Cornwall, and none in Monmouth.
The size and number of the hundreds into which the county is divided
tells us much the same tale. Each hundred was originally a group of one
hundred free English families, settled on the soil, and holding in
check the native subject population of Anglicised Celt-Euskarian
churls. Now, in Sussex we get 61 hundreds, and in Kent 61, as against
13 in Surrey beyond the Weald (where the clan names also sink to 18),
and 8 in Hertfordshire. Or, to put it another way, which I borrow from
Mr. Isaac Taylor, in Sussex there is one hundred to every 23 square
miles; in Kent to every 24; in Dorset to every 30; in Surrey to every
58; in Herts to every 79; in Gloucester to every 97; in Derby to every
162; in Warwick to every 179; and in Lancashire to every 302. In other
words, while in Kent, Sussex, and the east the free English inhabitants
clustered thickly on the soil, with a relatively small servile
population, in Mercia and the west the English population was much more
sparsely scattered, with a relatively great servile population. So, as
late as the time of Domesday, in Kent and Sussex the slaves mentioned
in the great survey (only a small part, probably, of the total)
numbered only 10 per cent. of the population, while in Devon and
Cornwall they numbered 20 per cent., and in Gloucestershire 33 per
cent.
These results are all inevitable. It is obvious that the first attacks
must necessarily be made upon the east and south coasts, and that the
inland districts and the west must only slowly be conquered afterward.
Especially was it easy to found Teutonic kingdoms in the four isolated
regions of Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, each of which
was cut off from the rest of England in early times by impassable fens,
marshes, forests, or rivers. It was easy here to kill off the Welsh
fighting population, to drive the remnants into the Fen Country or the
Weald, to enslave the captives, the women, and the children, and to
secure the Teutonic colony by a mark or border of woodland, swamp, or
hill. On the other hand, Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia, with a vague
and ill-defined internal border, had harder work to fight their way in
against a united Welsh resistance; and it was only very slowly that
they pushed across the central watershed, to dismember the unconquered
remnant of the Britons at last into the three isolated bodies of
Damnonia (Cornwall and Devon), Wales Proper, and Strathclyde. This is
probably why the earliest settlements were made in these isolated coast
regions, and why the inward progress of the other colonies was so
relatively slow.
The South Saxons, then, at first occupied the three fertile bits of the
county--the coast belt of Sussex Proper, the Valley of the Ouse, and
the isolated Hastings district--because these were the best adapted for
their strictly agricultural life. In spite of the legend of Ælle, I do
not suppose that they were all united from the first under a single
principality. It seems far more probable that each little clan
settlement was at first wholly independent; that afterwards three
little chieftainships grew up in the three fertile strips--typified,
perhaps, by the story of Ælle's three sons--and that the whole finally
coalesced into a single kingdom of the South Saxons, which is the state
in which we find the county in Bæda's time. As ever, its boundaries
were marked out for it by nature, for the Weald remained as yet an
almost unbroken forest; and the names of Selsea, Pevensey, Winchelsea,
Romney, and many others, show by their common insular termination
(found in all isles round the British coast, as in Sheppey, Walney,
Bardsea, Anglesea, Fursey, Wallasey, and so forth) that the marshland
was still wholly undrained, and that a few islands alone stood here and
there as masses of dry land out of their desolate and watery expanse.
The Hastings district, too, fell more naturally to Sussex than to Kent,
because the marshes dividing it from the former were far less
formidable than those which severed it from the latter. Most probably
the South Saxons intentionally aided nature in cutting off their
territory from all other parts of Britain; for every English kingdom
loved to surround itself with a distinct mark or border of waste, as a
defence against invasion from outside. The Romans had brought Sussex
within the great network of their road system; but the South Saxons no
doubt took special pains to cut off those parts of the roads which led
across their own frontier. At any rate, it is quite clear that Sussex
did not largely participate in the general life of the new England, and
that intercourse with the rest of the world was extremely limited.
The South Saxon kings probably lived for the most part at Chichester,
though no doubt they had _hams_, after the royal Teutonic fashion
generally, in many other parts of their territory; and they moved about
from one to the other, with their suite of thegns, eating up in each
what food was provided by their serfs for their use, and then moving on
to the next. The isolation of Sussex is strikingly shown by its long
adherence to the primitive paganism. Missionaries from Rome, under the
guidance of Augustine, converted Kent as early as 597. For Kent was the
nearest kingdom to the continent; it contained the chief port of entry
for continental travellers, Richborough--the Dover of those days--and
its king, accustomed to continental connections, had married a
Christian Frankish princess from Paris. Hence Kent was naturally the
first Teutonic principality to receive the faith. Next came
Northumbria, Lindsey, East Anglia, Wessex, and even inland Mercia. But
Sussex still held out for Thor and Woden as late as 679, three-quarters
of a century after the conversion of Kent, and twenty years after
Mercia itself had given way to the new faith. Even when Sussex was
finally converted, the manner in which the change took place was
characteristic. It was not by missionaries from beyond the Weald in
Kent or Surrey, nor from beyond the marsh in Wessex. An Irish monk,
Bæda tells us, coming ashore on the open coast near Chichester,
established a small monastery at Bosham--even then, no doubt, a royal
_ham_, as we know it was under Harold--'a place,' says the old
historian significantly, 'girt round by sea and forest.' (It lies just
on the mark between Wessex and the South Saxons.) Æthelwealh, the
king--a curious name, for it means 'noble Welshman' (perhaps he was of
mixed blood)--had already been baptized in Mercia, and his wife was the
daughter of a Christian ealdorman of the Worcester-men; but the rest of
the principality was heathen. The Irish monk effected nothing; but
shortly after Wilfrith, the fiery Bishop of York, on one of his usual
flying visits to Rome, got shipwrecked off Selsea. With his accustomed
vigour, he went ashore, and began a crusade in the heathen land. He was
able at once to baptize the 'leaders and soldiers'--that is to say, the
free military English population; while his attendant priests--Eappa,
Padda, Burghelm, and Oiddi (it is pleasant to preserve these little
personal touches)--proceeded to baptize the 'plebs'--that is to say,
the servile Anglicised Celt-Euskarian substratum--up and down the
country villages.
It was to Wilfrith, too, that Sussex owed her first cathedral.
Æthelwealh made him a present of Selsea, 'a place surrounded by the sea
on every side save one, where an isthmus about as broad as a
stone's-throw connects it with the mainland,' and there the ardent
bishop founded a regular monastery, in which he himself remained for
five years. On the soil were 250 serfs, whom Wilfrith at once set free.
After the death of Aldhelm, the West Saxon bishop, in 709, Sussex was
made a separate bishopric, with its seat at Selsea; and it was not till
after the Norman Conquest that the cathedral was removed to Chichester.
It may be noted that all these arrangements were in strict accordance
with early English custom. The kings generally gave their bishops a
seat near their own chief town, as Cuthbert had his see at Lindisfarne,
close to the royal Northumbrian capital of Bamborough; so that the
proximity of Selsea to Chichester made it the most natural place for a
bishopstool; and, again, it was usual to make over spots in the fens or
marshes to the monks, who, by draining and cultivating them, performed
a useful secular work. No traces now remain of old Selsea Cathedral,
its site having long been swallowed up by incursions of the sea. Bæda
has the ordinary number of miracles to record in connection with the
monastery.
As time went on, however, the isolation of Sussex became less complete.
Æthelwealh had got himself into complications with Wessex by accepting
the sovereignty of the Isle of Wight and the Meonwaras about
Southhampton from the hands of a Mercian conqueror. Perhaps Æthelwealh
then repaired the old Roman roads which led from his own _ham_ at
Chichester to Portsmouth in Wessex, and broke down the mark, so as to
connect his old and his new dominions with one another. At any rate,
shortly after, Cædwalla, the West Saxon, an ætheling at large on the
look-out for a kingdom, attacked him suddenly with his host of thegns
from this unexpected quarter, killed the King himself, and harried the
South Saxons from marsh to marsh. Two South Saxons thegns expelled him
for a time, and made themselves masters of the country. But afterwards,
Cædwalla, becoming King of the West Saxons, recovered Sussex once more,
and handed it on to his successor, Ini. Hence the South Saxons had no
bishopric of their own during this period, but were included in the see
of the West Saxons at Winchester.
During the hundred years of the Mercian Supremacy, coincident, roughly
speaking, with the eighth century, we hear little of Sussex; but it
seems to have shaken off the yoke of Wessex, and to have been in
subjection to the great Mercian over-lords alone. It had its own
under-kings and its own bishops. Early in the ninth century, however,
when Ecgberht the West Saxon succeeding in throwing off the Mercian
yoke, the other Saxon States of South Britain willingly joined him
against the Anglian oppressors. 'The men of Kent and Surrey, Sussex and
Essex, gladly submitted to King Ecgberht.' When the royal house of the
South Saxons died out, Sussex still retained a sort of separate
existence within the West Saxon State, as Wales does in the England of
our own day. Æthelwulf made his son under-king of Kent, Essex, Surrey,
and Sussex; and so, during the troublous times of the Danish invasion,
when all southern England became one in its resistance to the heathen,
those old principalities gradually sank into the position of provinces
or shires.
From the period of union with the general West Saxon Kingdom (which
grew slowly into the Kingdom of England under Eadgar and Cnut), the
markland of the Weald seems to have been gradually encroached upon from
the south. Most of the names in that district are distinctly
'Anglo-Saxon' in type; by which I mean that they were imposed before
the Norman Conquest, and belong to the stage of the language then in
use. Even during the Roman period, settlements for iron-mining existed
in the Weald, and these clearings would of course be occupied by the
English colonists at a comparatively early time. Just at the foot of
the Downs, too, on the north side, we find a few clan settlements on
the edge of the Weald, which must date from the first period of English
colonisation. Such are Poynings, Didling, Ditchling, Chillington, and
Chiltington. Farther in, however, the clan names grow rarer; and where
we find them they are not _hams_ or _tuns_, regular communities of
Saxon settlers, but they show, by their forestine terminations of
_hurst_, _ley_, _den_, and _field_, that they were mere outlying
shelters of hunters or swineherds in the trackless forest. Such are
Billinghurst, Warminghurst, Itchingfield, and Ardingley. On the
Cuckmere river, the villages in the combes bear names like Jevington
and Lullington; but in the upper valley of the little stream, where it
flows through the Weald, we find instead Chiddingley and Hellingley.
Most of the Weald villages, however, bear still more woodland
titles--Midhurst, Farnhurst, Nuthurst, Maplehurst, and Lamberhurst;
Cuckfield, Mayfield, Rotherfield, Hartfield, Heathfield, and
Wivelsfield; Crawley, Cowfold, Loxwood, Linchmere, and Marden. _Hams_
and _tuns_, the sure signs of early English colonisation, are almost
wholly lacking; in their place we get abundance of such names as
Coneyhurst Common, Water Down Forest, Hayward's Heath, Milland Marsh,
and Bell's Oak Green. To this day even, the greater part of the Weald
is down in park, copse, heath, forest, common, or marshland. Throughout
the whole expanse of the woodland region in Sussex, with the outlying
portions in Kent, Surrey, and Hants, Mr. Isaac Taylor has collected no
fewer than 299 local names with the significant forest terminations in
_hurst_, _den_, _ley_, _holt_, and _field_. These facts show that,
during the later 'Anglo-Saxon' period, the Weald was being slowly
colonised in a few favourable spots. Its use as a mark was now gone,
and it might be safely employed for the peaceful purposes of the archer
and the swineherd. Names referring to pasture and the wild beasts are
therefore common.
To the same time must doubtless be assigned the exact delimitation of
the Sussex frontiers. During the early periods, the Kentings, the
Suthrige, and the West Saxons would all extend on their side as far as
the Weald, which would be treated as a sort of neutral zone. But when
the Woodland itself began to be occupied, a demarcation would naturally
be made between the neighbouring provinces. The boundary follows the
most obvious course. It starts on the east from the old mouth of the
Rother (now diverted to Rye New Harbour), known as the Kent Ditch, in
what was then the central and most impassable part of the marshland. It
runs along the Rother to its bifurcation, and then makes for the
heaven-water-parting or dividing back of the Forest Ridge, beside two
or three lesser streams. Then it passes along the crest of the ridge
from Tunbridge Wells, past East Grinstead and Crawley, till it strikes
the Hampshire border. There it follows the line between the two
watersheds to the sea, which it reaches at Emsworth. There is, however,
one long insulated spur of Hampshire running down from Haslemere to
Graffham (in apparent defiance of geographical features), whose origin
and meaning I do not understand.
With the Norman Conquest, the history of Sussex, and of England
generally, for the most part ceases abruptly; all the rest is mere
personal gossip about Prince Edward and the battle of Lewes, or about
George IV. and the Brighton Pavilion. Not, of course, that there is not
real national history here as elsewhere; but it is hard to disentangle
from the puerile personalities of historians generally. Nevertheless,
some brief attempt to reconstruct the main facts in the subsequent
history of Sussex must still be undertaken. The part which Sussex bore
passively in the actual Conquest is itself typical of the new
relations. England was getting drawn into the general run of European
civilisation, and the old isolation of Sussex was beginning to be
broken down. Lying so near the Continent, Sussex was naturally the
landing-place for an army coming from Normandy or Ponthieu. William's
fleet came ashore on the low coast at Pevensey. Naturally he turned
towards Hastings, whence a road now led through the Weald to London. On
the tall cliffs he threw up an earthwork, and then marched towards the
great town. Harold's army met him on the heights of Senlac, part of the
solitary ridge between the marshes, by which alone London could be
reached. Harold fell on the spot now marked by the ruined high altar of
Battle Abbey--a national monument at present in the keeping of an
English duke. Once the native army was routed, William marched on
resistlessly to London, and Sussex and England were at his feet.