in the existing rapes. Of these there are six, called respectively
after Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. It
will be noticed at once that these were the seats of the new bishopric
and of the five great early castles. In one form or another, more or
less modernised, Arundel Castle, Bramber Castle, Lewes Castle, Pevensey
Castle, and Hastings Castle all survive to our own day. In accordance
with their ordinary policy of removing cathedrals from villages to
chief towns, and so concentrating the civil and ecclesiastical
government, the Normans brought the bishopstool from Selsea to
Chichester. The six rapes are fairly coincident--Chichester with the
marsh district; Arundel with the dale of Arun; Bramber with the dale of
Adur; Lewes with the western dale of Ouse; Pevensey with the eastern
dale of Ouse; and Hastings with the insulated region between the
marshes. In other words, Sussex seems to have been cut up into six
natural divisions along the sea-shore; while to each division was
assigned all the Weald back of its own shore strip as far as the
border. Thus the rapes consist of six long longitudinal belts, each
with a short sea front and a long stretch back into the Weald.
Increased intercourse with the Continent brought the Cinque Ports into
importance; and, as premier Cinque Port, Hastings grew to be one of the
chief towns in Sussex. The constant French wars made them prominent in
mediæval history. As trade grew up, other commercial harbours gave rise
to considerable mercantile towns. Rye and Winchelsea, at the mouth of
the Rother, were great ports of entry from France as late as the days
of Elizabeth. Seaford, at the mouth of the Ouse, was also an important
harbour till 1570, when a terrible storm changed the course of the
stream to the town called from that fact Newhaven. Lewes was likewise a
port, as the estuary of the Ouse was navigable from the mouth up to the
town. Brighthelmstone was still a village; but old Shoreham on the Adur
was a considerable place. Arundel Haven and Chichester Harbour recalls
the old mercantile importance of their respective neighbourhoods. The
only other places of any note in mediæval Sussex were Steyning, under
the walls of Bramber Castle; Hurstmonceux, which the Conqueror bestowed
upon the lord of Eu; Battle, where he planted his great expiatory
abbey; and Hurst Pierpont, which also dates from William's own time.
The sole important part of the county was still the strip along the
coast between the Weald and the sea.
During the Plantagenet period, England became a wool-exporting country,
like Australia at the present day; and therefore the wool-growing parts
of the island rose quickly into great importance. Sussex, with its
large expanse of chalk downs, naturally formed one of the best
wool-producing tracts; and in the reign of Edward III., Chichester was
made one of the 'staples' to which the wool trade was confined by
statute. Sussex Proper and the Lewes valley were now among the most
thickly populated regions of England.
The Weald, too, was beginning to have its turn. English iron was
getting to be in request for the cannon, armour, and arms required in
the French wars; and nowhere was iron more easily procured, side by
side with the fuel for smelting it, than in the Sussex Weald. From the
days of the Edwards to the early part of the eighteenth century, the
woods of the Weald were cut down in quantities for the iron works.
During this time, several small towns began to spring up in the old
forest region, of which the chief are Midhurst, Petworth, Billinghurst,
Horsham, Cuckfield, and East Grinstead. Many of the deserted
smelting-places may still be seen, with their invariable accompaniment
of a pond or dam. The wood supply began to fail as early as Elizabeth's
reign, but iron was still smelted in 1760. From that time onward, the
competition of Sheffield and Birmingham--where iron was prepared by the
'new method' with coal--blew out the Sussex furnaces, and the Weald
relapsed once more into a wild heather-clad and wood-covered region,
now thickly interspersed with parks and country seats, of which
Petworth, Cowdry, and Ashburnham are the best known.
Modern times, of course, have brought their changes. With the northward
revolution caused by steam and coal, Sussex, like the rest of southern
England, has fallen back to a purely agricultural life. The sea has
blocked up the harbours of Rye, Winchelsea, Seaford, and Lewes. Man's
hand has drained the marshes of the Rother, of Pevensey, and of Selsea
Bill; and railways have broken down the isolation of Sussex from the
remainder of the country. Still, as of old, the natural configuration
continues to produce its necessary effects. Even now there are no towns
of any size in the Weald: few, save Lewes, Arundel, and Chichester,
anywhere but on the coast. The Downs are given up to sheep-farming; the
Weald to game and pleasure-grounds; the shore to holiday-making. The
proximity to London is now the chief cause of Sussex prosperity. In the
old coaching days, Brighton was a foregone conclusion. Sixty miles by
road from town, it was the nearest accessible spot by the seaside. As
soon as people began to think of annual holidays, Brighton must
necessarily attract them. Hence George IV. and the Pavilion. The
railroad has done more. It has made Brighton into a suburb, and raised
its population to over 100,000. At the same time, the South Coast line
has begotten watering-places at Worthing, Bognor, and Littlehampton. In
the other direction, it has created Eastbourne. Those who do not love
chalk (as the Georges did), choose rather the more broken and wooded
country round Hastings and St. Leonards, where the Weald sandstone runs
down to the sea. The difference between the rounded Downs and
saucer-shaped combes of the chalk, and the deep glens traversing the
soft friable strata of the Wealden, is well seen in passing from Beachy
Head to Ecclesbourne and Fairlight. Shoreham is kept half alive by the
Brighton coal trade: Newhaven struggles on as a port for Dieppe. But as
a whole, the county is now one vast seaside resort from end to end, so
that to-day the flat coasts at Selsea, Pevensey, and Rye, are alone
left out in the cold. The iron trade and the wool trade have long since
gone north to the coal districts. Brighton and Hastings sum up in
themselves all that is vital in the Sussex of 1881.
THE BRONZE AXE.
There is always a certain fascination in beginning a subject at the
wrong end and working backward: it has the charm which inevitably
attaches to all evil practices; you know you oughtn't, and so you can't
resist the temptation to outrage the proprieties and do it. I can't
myself resist the temptation of beginning this article where it ought
to break off--with Chinese money, which is not the origin, but the
final outcome and sole remaining modern representative of that antique
and almost prehistoric implement, the Bronze Age hatchet.
Improbable and grotesque as this affiliation sounds at first hearing,
it is, nevertheless, about as certain as any other fact in
anthropological science--which isn't, perhaps, saying a great deal. The
familiar little brass cash, with the square hole for stringing them
together on a thread in the centre, well known to the frequenter of
minor provincial museums, are, strange to say, the lineal descendants,
in unbroken order, of the bronze axe of remote Celestial ancestors.
From the regular hatchet to the modern coin one can trace a distinct,
if somewhat broken, succession, so that it is impossible to say where
the one leaves off and the other begins--where the implement merges
into the medium of exchange, and settles down finally into the root of
all evil.
Here is how this curious pedigree first worked itself out. In early
times, before coin was invented, barter was usually conducted between
producer and consumer with metal implements, as it still is in Central
Africa at the present day with Venetian glass beads and rolls of red
calico. Payments were all made in kind, and bronze was the commonest
form of specie. A gentleman desirous of effecting purchases in foreign
parts went about the world with a number of bronze axes in his pocket
(or its substitute), which he exchanged for other goods with the native
traffickers in the country where he did his primitive business. At
first, the early Chinese in that unsophisticated age were content to
use real hatchets for this commercial purpose; but, after a time, with
the profound mercantile instinct of their race, it occurred to some of
them that when a man wanted half a hatchet's worth of goods he might as
well pay for them with half a hatchet. Still, as it would be a pity to
spoil a good working implement by cutting it in two, the worthy Ah Sin
ingeniously compromised the matter by making thin hatchets, of the
usual size and shape, but far too slender for practical usage. By so
doing he invented coin: and, what is more, he invented it far earlier
than the rival claimants to that proud distinction, the Lydians, whose
electrum staters were first struck in the seventh century, B.C. But,
according to Professor Terrien de la Couperie, some of the fancy
Chinese hatchets which we still retain date back as far as the year
1000 (a good round number), and are so thin that they could only have
been intended to possess exchange value. And when a distinguished
Sinologist gives us a date for anything Chinese, it behoves the rest of
the unlearned world to open its mouth and shut its eyes, and thankfully
receive whatever the distinguished Sinologist may send it.
In the seventh century, then, these mercantile axes, made in the
strictest sense to sell and not to use, were stamped with an official
stamp to mark their amount, and became thereby converted into true
coins--that was the root of the 'root of all evil.' Thence the
declension to the 'cash' is easy; the form grew gradually more and more
regular, while the square hole in the centre, once used for the handle,
was retained by conservatism and practical sense as a convenient means
of stringing them together.
So this was the end of the old bronze hatchet, perhaps the most
wonderful civilizing agent ever invented by human ingenuity. Let us
hark back now, and from the opposite side see what was its first
beginning.
'But why,' you ask, 'the most wonderful civilizing agency? What did the
bronze axe ever do for humanity?' Well, nearly everything. I believe I
have really not said too much. We are apt to talk big nowadays about
the steam-engine, and that marvellous electricity which is always going
to do wonders for us all--to-morrow; but I don't know whether either
ever produced so great a revolution in human life, or so completely
metamorphosed human existence, as that simple and commonplace bronze
hatchet.
For, consider that before the days of bronze man knew no weapon or
implement of any sort save the stone axe, or tomahawk, and the
flint-tipped arrow. Consider, that the highest stage of human culture
he had then reached was hardly higher than that of the scalp-hunting
Red Indian or the seal-spearing Esquimaux. Consider, that in his Stone
Age agriculture and grains were almost unknown--the forest uncleared,
the soil untilled, and hunting and fishing the sole or principal human
activities. It was the bronze axe that first enabled man to make
clearings in the woodland on the large scale, and to sow on those
clearings in good big fields the wheat and barley which determined the
first great upward step in the drama of civilization. All these things
depend in ultimate analysis upon that pioneer of culture, the bronze
hatchet.
And how did the first Watt or Edison of metallurgy come to make that
earliest bronze implement? Well, it seems probable that between the
Stone Age and the Bronze Age there intervened everywhere, or nearly
everywhere, a very short and transient age of copper. And the reason
for thus thinking is threefold. In the first place, bronze is an alloy
of tin and copper: and it seems natural to suppose that men would use
the simple metals in isolation to begin with, before they discovered
that they could harden and temper them by mixing the two together. In
the second place, copper occurs in the pure or native state (without
the trouble of smelting) in several countries, and was therefore a very
natural metal for early man to cast his inquiring glance upon. And in
the third place, weapons of unmixed copper, apparently of very antique
types, have been found in various parts of the world, both in Asia and
America. According to Mr. John Evans, the most learned historian of the
Bronze Age, the greatest copper 'find' of the eastern hemisphere was
that at Gungeria, in Central India; and the copper implements there
found consisted entirely of flat celts of a very early and almost
primitive pattern.
The copper weapons of America, however, have greater illustrative and
ethnological interest, because the noble red man, at the period when
Columbus first discovered him, and when he first discovered Columbus,
was still in the Stone Age of his very imperfect culture, or, to speak
more correctly, of extreme barbarism. The fact is, the Indians of Lake
Superior were only just beginning to employ copper, and were on the eve
of independently inaugurating a Bronze Age of their own, when the
intrusive white man came and spoiled the fun by the incontinent
introduction of iron, firearms, missionaries, whisky, and all the other
resources of civilization. On the shores of Lake Superior native copper
exists in abundance; and the intelligent Red Indian, finding this
handsome red stone in the cliffs by his side, was pretty sure to try
his hand at chipping a tomahawk out of the rare material. But, as soon
as he did so, Mr. Evans suggests, he would find to his surprise that it
yielded to his blows; in short, that he had got that singular
phenomenon, a malleable stone, to deal with. Hammering away at his new
invention, he must shortly have hammered it into a shapely axe. The new
process took his practical fancy at once: vistas of an untold wealth of
scalps floated gaily before his fevered brain; and he proceeded to
hammer himself various weapons and implements without delay. Amongst
others, he produced for himself very neat spear-heads, with sockets
adapted for the reception of a shaft, made by hammering out the base
flat, and then turning over the edges so as to enclose the wood between
them, like a modern hoe-handle. In Wisconsin alone more than a hundred
of such copper axes, spear-heads, and knives have been unearthed by
antiquaries and duly recorded.
All these weapons, however, are simply hammered, not cast or melted.
The Red Indian hadn't yet reached the stage of making a mould when De
Champlain and his _voyageurs_ came down upon Canada and interrupted
this interesting experiment in industrial development by springing the
seventeenth century upon the unsophisticated red man at one fell blow,
with all its inherited wealth of European science. Nevertheless, the
Indians must have known that fire melted copper; for the heat of the
altars was great enough, say Squier and Davis, to fuse the implements
and ornaments laid upon them in sacrificial rites; and so the fact of
its fusibility could hardly have escaped them. A people who had
advanced so far on the road towards the invention of casting could
hardly have been prevented from taking the final step, save by the
sudden intervention of some social cataclysm like the European invasion
of Eastern America. And how awful a calamity that was for the Indians
themselves we at this day can hardly even realize.
In some similar way, no doubt, the Asiatic people who first invented
bronze must have learned the fact of the fusibility of metals, and have
applied it in time, at first, perhaps, by accident, to the manufacture
of that hard alloy. I say Asiatic, because there seems good reason to
believe that Asia was the original home of the nascent bronze industry.
For a Bronze Age almost necessarily implies a brief preceding age of
copper; and there is no proof of pure copper implements ever having
been largely used in Europe, while there is ample proof of their having
been used to a very considerable extent in Asia. Hence we may
reasonably infer that the art of bronze-making was developed in Asia by
a copper-using people, and that when metallurgy was first introduced
into Europe the method of mixing the copper with tin had already been
perfected. The abundance of tin in the south-eastern islands of Asia
renders this view probable; while in Europe there are no tin mines
worth mentioning, except in the remotest part of a remote outlying
island--to wit, in Cornwall.
Be this as it may, the earliest and simplest forms of bronze axe with
which we are acquainted are profoundly interesting, as casting a flood
of light upon the general process of human evolution all the world
over. Every new human invention is always at first directly modelled
upon the other similar products which have preceded it. There is no
really new thing under the sun. For example, the earliest English
railway carriages were built on the model of the old stage-coach, only
that three stage-coaches, as it were, were telescoped together, side by
side--the very first bore the significant motto, _Tria juncta in
uno_--and it was this preconception of the English coachbuilder that
has hampered us ever since with our hateful 'compartments,' instead of
the commodious and comfortable open American saloon carriages. So, too,
the earliest firearms were modelled on the stock of the old cross-bow,
and the earliest earthenware pots and pans were shaped like the still
more primitive gourds and calabashes. It need not surprise us,
therefore, to find that the earliest metal axes of which we have any
knowledge were directly moulded on the original shape of the stone
tomahawk.
Such a copper hatchet, cast in a mould formed by a polished neolithic
stone celt, was found in an early Etruscan tomb, and is still preserved
in the Museum at Berlin. See how natural this process would be. For, in
the first place, the primitive workman, knowing already only one form
of axe, the stone tomahawk, would naturally reproduce it in the new
material, without thinking what improvements in shape and design the
malleability and fusibility of the metal would render possible or easy.
But, more than that, the idea of coating the polished stone axe with
plastic clay, and thereby making a mould for the molten metal, would be
so very simple that even the neolithic savage, already accustomed to
the manufacture of coarse pottery upon natural shapes, could hardly
fail to think of it. As a matter of fact, he did think of it: for celts
of bronze or copper, cast in moulds made from stone hatchets, have been
found in Cyprus by General di Cesnola, on the site of Troy by Dr.
Schliemann, and in many other assorted localities by less distinguished
but equally trustworthy archæologists.
To the neolithic hunter, herdsman, and villager this progress from the
stone to the metal axe probably seemed at first a mere substitution of
an easier for a more difficult material. He little knew whither his
discovery tended. It was pure human laziness that urged the change. How
nice to save yourself all that long trouble of chipping and polishing,
with ceaseless toil, in favour of a stone which you could melt at one
go and pour while hot into a ready-made mould! It must have looked, by
comparison, like weapon-making by magic; for properly to cut and polish
a stone axe is the work of weeks and weeks of elbow-grease. Yet here,
in a moment, a better hatchet could be turned out all finished! But the
implied effects lay deeper far than the neolithic hunter could ever
have imagined. The bronze axe was the beginning of civilization; it
brought the steam-engine, the telephone, woman's rights, and the county
councillor directly in its train. With the eye of faith, had he only
possessed that useful optical organ, the Stone Age artizan might
doubtless have beheld Pears' soap and the deceased wife's sister
looming dimly in the remote future. Till that moment human life had
been almost stationary: thenceforth, it proceeded by leaps and bounds,
like a kangaroo society, on its upward path towards triumphant
democracy and the penny post. The nineteenth century and all its wiles
hung by a thread upon the success of his melting pot.
Indeed, the whole history of human civilization has been one of a
constantly accelerated progress. The Older Stone Age, when men knew
only how to chip flint implements, but hadn't yet invented the art of
grinding and polishing them, was one of immense and incalculable
duration, to be reckoned perhaps by tens of thousands of years--some
bold chronologists would even suggest by hundreds of thousands.
Improvement there was, to be sure, during all that long epoch of slow
development; but it was improvement at a snail's pace. The very rude
chipped axes of the naked drift age give way after thousands and
thousands of years to the shapelier chipped lances, javelins, and
arrowheads of the skin-clad cavemen. M. Gabriel de Mortillet, indeed,
most indefatigable of theorists, has even pointed out four stages of
culture, marked by four different types of weapons, into which he
subdivides the Older Stone Age. Yet vast epochs elapsed before some
prehistoric Stephenson or dusky Morse first, half by accident, smote
out the idea of grinding his tomahawk smooth to a sharp cutting edge,
instead of merely chipping it sharp, and so initiated the Neolithic
Period. This Neolithic Period itself, again, was immensely long as
compared with the Bronze Age which followed, though short by comparison
with the Palæolithic epoch which preceded it. Then the Bronze Age saw
enormous changes come faster and faster, till the use of iron still
further accelerated the rate of progress. For each new improvement
becomes, in turn, the parent of yet newer triumphs, so that at last, as
in the present day, a single century sees vaster changes in the world
of man than whole ages before it have done in far longer intervals.
But the invention of bronze, or, in other words, the introduction of
hard metal, was really perhaps the very greatest epoch of all, the most
distinct turning-point in the whole history of humanity. True, some
beginnings of civilisation were already found in the Newer Stone Age.
Man did not then live by slaughter alone. Hand-made pottery and rude
tissues of flax are found in neolithic lake dwellings in Switzerland.
Agriculture was already practised in a feeble way on small open
clearings, cautiously cleaved with fire or hewn with the tomahawk in
the native forests. The cow, the sheep, and the goat were more or less
domesticated, though the horse was yet riderless; and the pastoral had
therefore, to some extent, superseded the pure hunting stage. But what
inroad could the stone hatchet make unaided upon the virgin forests of
those remote days? The neolithic clearing must have been a mere stray
oasis in a desert of woodland, like the villages of the New Guinea
savages at the present day, lying few and far between among vast
stretches of primæval forest.