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Title: Sussex Painted By Wilfrid Ball
Author: Ball, Wilfrid
Language: English
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CORRIGENDA
[Corrections made in EBook.]
Page 48, line 14,
“eastern” _should be_ “western.”
Page 82, last word on page,
“Shoreham” _should be_ “Seaford.”
Page 91, line 14,
“Beechy Head” _should be_ “Beachy Head.”
SUSSEX
A COMPANION VOLUME
IN THE SAME SERIES
WESSEX
PAINTED BY WALTER TYNDALE
DESCRIBED BY CLIVE HOLLAND
CONTAINING =75= FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
PRICE =20s.= NET
Post free, 20s. 6d.
Mr. THOMAS HARDY, writing to Mr. Tyndale concerning his pictures
reproduced in this volume, says: “...to their fidelity both in form
and colour I can testify. And you seem to have conveyed in your
renderings that under-picture, as one may say, that mood or temperament
that pertains to each particular spot portrayed and to no other on
earth.”
Mr. Clive Holland writes in sympathy with Mr. Tyndale’s pictures, and he
presents Wessex, its people, its story and romance, in an attractive
form for the general reader.
PUBLISHED BY
A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
27 RICHMOND STREET WEST, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF BATTLE]
SUSSEX
PAINTED BY WILFRID
BALL, R.E. · PUBLISHED
BY ADAM & CHARLES
BLACK·LONDON·MCMVI
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PART I
PAGE
THE PHYSICAL NATURE OF THE COUNTY 1
PART II
THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SUSSEX 47
PART III
THE INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER OF SUSSEX AND THE WAY
TO SEE THE COUNTY 143
INDEX 191
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Village of Battle _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. Market Cross, Alfriston 2
3. Hastings, Fishing Fleet 4
4. Bosham 6
5. Mayfield 8
6. Chichester Cross 10
7. Lyminster 12
8. Bury, from the Arun 14
9. Sussex Hills 16
10. The Rother 18
11. Cold Waltham 20
12. Fittleworth Bridge 22
13. Coates 24
14. Amberley Village 28
15. Bramber Castle 32
16. South Harting 34
17. The Swan Hotel, Fittleworth 36
18. Arundel Castle (Evening) 38
19. The Town Clock, Steyning 40
20. The Rother at Fittleworth 42
21. Rye 44
22. Church Street, Steyning 46
23. Farmhouse, Leys Green 50
24. Near Pevensey 52
25. Lych Gate, Pulborough 56
26. Pulborough 58
27. Hartfield, The Inn 60
28. Ewhurst 62
29. Malling Mill 66
30. Fishbourne Mill 68
31. St. Mary’s Church, Rye 70
32. Fittleworth Village 72
33. Groombridge 76
34. Bosham (Mill Bridge) 78
35. West Ham 80
36. Lewes Castle 82
37. Garden of the Moated House, Groombridge 84
38. Pevensey Castle 86
39. Cliffs near Eastbourne 88
40. Mayfield 90
41. Winchelsea 92
42. The Star Inn, Alfriston 94
43. Hastings, The Shore 96
44. Hurstmonceaux Castle 98
45. Bodiam Castle 102
46. Arundel Castle 104
47. Amberley Chalk Pits 106
48. Midhurst, Knock Hundred Row 108
49. Amberley Church 110
50. Mermaid Street, Rye 114
51. Singleton 116
52. Gatehouse, Battle Abbey 118
53. Winchelsea Mill 120
54. Glynde 124
55. Angmering Mill 126
56. Near Hardham 128
57. Mickleham Priory 130
58. The Mermaid Inn, Rye 132
59. Bury Church 134
60. Fittleworth Water Mill 142
61. High Street, East Grinstead 144
62. Cottages at Mayfield 146
63. Crowborough Heath 152
64. Rye from Camber 154
65. Hartfield 156
66. Pulborough Marsh 160
67. King Richard’s Walk, Chichester Cathedral 164
68. Old Whiting Mill, Midhurst 168
69. Mill Pool, Midhurst 170
70. Beachy Head 178
71. Willingdon 180
72. Boat-building at Rye 182
73. Old Shoreham Bridge 184
74. The Arun, near Pulborough 186
75. Bosham 188
_Sketch Map at end of Volume._
_The Illustrations in this volume have been engraved and printed in
England by the Hentschel Colour-type process._
SUSSEX
PART I
THE PHYSICAL NATURE OF THE COUNTY
The English counties differ in two ways from the divisions into which
other European countries have fallen: in the first place, they are
somewhat smaller than the average division, natural or artificial, of
other countries; and in the second place, they have in many cases a more
highly-specialised life. Both these features have been of great value in
building up the history of England, and, before one sets out to
understand any county, it is always worth one’s while to remember them
and to appreciate their importance in our national development.
The strong local character of counties is more discoverable in some than
in others. Thus Cheshire with its distinctive plain; Cornwall with its
peculiar racial and, till recently, linguistic features; Devon, all
grouped round one great lump of hills, almost make little nations by
themselves. Again, those who are acquainted with the north of England
will mark the quite separate character which Durham contrasts against
Yorkshire on the south and Northumberland upon the north. There are
other districts where several counties group themselves together, and
where the whole group differs more from the rest of England than do the
separate counties of the group one from another. This is particularly
the case with East Anglia, and to some extent it is the case with the
Shires.
When (to return to the case of particular counties) some strong local
differential is discoverable it can nearly always be traced to a
combination of historical and topographical causes. It is our business
to examine these first in an appreciation of the county of Sussex.
Sussex was created from the sea. Its inhabitants and its invaders at all
periods, save perhaps in the height of the Roman prosperity, and again
during the last hundred and fifty years, have had a difficulty in going
northward, because there spread north of the most habitable region the
long belt of what is called the Weald. Sussex is, in a word, a great
range of hills along the south coast inhabited upon either slope and
upon either plain
[Illustration: MARKET CROSS, ALFRISTON]
[Illustration]
at either base, but cut off from the Thames valley by a soil long
uncultivated and more suited to forest than to habitation.
[Sidenote: THE HARBOURS]
From the coast side it presents a number of clearly-defined harbours,
from which it has evidently been colonised, and from which we know it to
have been invaded; these harbours are the mouths of its small, parallel,
characteristic rivers--the Arun, the Adur, the Ouse, the Cuckmere, and
the Rother. Of natural harbours other than the mouths of the rivers it
now has none, though it is probable that in the remote past plains,
which are now dry land guarded by small elevations (as for example,
Pevensey and Winchelsea), formed natural harbours afterwards
artificially developed. These harbours are small for our modern scale of
shipping, and the strong tide that runs in them is rather a disadvantage
than otherwise for those who use them to-day. But in early times such
tides were nothing but an advantage, and the smaller draft and beam of
the shipping found ample accommodation in the river mouths. It is also
to be noted that these river mouths stood at fairly even distances one
from the other. There is not in the whole length of the coast of
England, from the South Foreland to Penzance, a strip of coast so
exactly divided by refuges set at regular distances into which small
craft can run. Moreover, Sussex also provides a multitude of those even,
sloping, and safe beaches which were of such immense importance to early
navigators, with whom the beaching of a whole fleet was among the
commonest ways of effecting a landing. The typical Sussex example of
this early advantage and of a town springing around it is, of course, to
be discovered at Hastings.
It may next be inquired what limits eastward and westward existed to
form natural boundaries for the county. This is a point of great
interest which has been but little examined, but which a consideration
of the geography of Sussex should make sufficiently plain. The early
settlements along the river mouths were grouped together in one
countryside by the comparative facility of communication along the
sea-plain, and again by the comparative facility of communication along
the well-watered belt to the north of the Downs. It may be imagined that
the settlements around the harbours of the Ouse, of the Arun, and of the
Adur, would, from the earliest times, have been in touch with each other
along the flat of the coast, and that their extensions along the river
valleys to
[Illustration: HASTINGS--FISHING FLEET]
the north of the hills, as also the separate harbour at the mouth of the
Rother, would equally have been in communication by that ancient track
most of which subsists to this day, and of which further mention will be
made later on in these pages. But, when the primitive inhabitant
attempted a similar communication eastward into what is now Kent, or
westward with what is now Hampshire, his way was barred by two great
tongues of marsh.
[Sidenote: THE MARSHES]
Traces of these marshes still exist after two thousand years of
cultivation, and in the very earliest times they must have presented a
most formidable obstacle to travel. The one group which lies to the east
of the valley of the Rother is still in part undrained; the other, which
forms a mass of tidal creeks and inlets round about Hayling Island,
Bosham, and Chichester harbour, is almost equally difficult. These two,
then, set the limits of the county; for marsh is, of all obstacles, the
most considerable at the beginning of a civilisation, as it is the least
remembered in the height of one. It cannot be forded as can a stream,
nor swum nor sailed upon; mere effort, such as that required for the
climbing of mountains, is of no avail against it, and, whereas some
considerable toil _will_ clear a track through a forest, and a track
which, in our climate at least, can be maintained, once it is formed,
with little labour, no such effort is of avail to primitive man in
attempting to cross a morass. To drain it is quite beyond his power, and
the formation of a causeway of hard land is, even in our own day, a most
expensive and long process, as those readers who are acquainted with the
history of our engineering will remember when they recall the building
of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway across Chat Moss.
It may be remarked in passing that there are scattered up and down
England many examples of the difficulties which Fenland and bog present
to an imperfect civilisation, and these are to be found in the
“Stretfords,” “Stratfords,” “Standfords,” etc., which invariably mark a
place where a hard Roman road was conducted across a river and its
adjoining wet lands. In such places the straight line of the old Roman
road can usually be traced, and one can also usually see how the modern
road follows a devious track given to it after the decline of the Roman
civilisation, when the imperial ways had been allowed to decay, and the
half-barbarian traveller of the Dark Ages picked his way as best he
could from one dry patch to another. These
[Illustration: BOSHAM]
deviations of the modern from the Roman lines across rivers and marshes
in England are one of the most striking evidences of the gulf into which
civilisation sank after the advent of the Saxon pirates.
[Sidenote: DATE OF TOWNS]
Sussex, then, has been naturally delimited in its growth by the forest
of the Weald all along the north, and by these two groups of marshes at
the extreme east and west of the county; and the older our record the
greater importance assumed by towns within reach of, or upon, the sea.
Thus Midhurst, Petworth, Pulboro, Horsham, Mayfield, Battle, come all of
them comparatively late in the history of the development of the county.
Chichester, Arundel, Lewes, Hastings, Pevensey, come early in that
development, and so does Bramber with its harbour of Old Shoreham.
Pevensey and Chichester are associated with a Roman name; Bramber, or
rather its neighbour Shoreham, and Pevensey (again) with the first of
the Saxon invasions. Arundel with the reign of King Alfred; Hastings and
(for the third time) Pevensey with the Norman invasion; whereas the
other towns that lie in a belt northward upon the edge of the Weald are
not heard of till the Middle Ages.
The present boundaries of the county are necessarily somewhat
artificial, though they conform fairly closely to the natural features
which we have just been considering. Their artificiality is most easily
seen along the north. The true line of division should run along the
ridge of the forests: St Leonards and Ashdown.
As a fact, political and organised Sussex overlaps this ridge and takes
in part of what is geographically Surrey upon the north. The reason of
this is that during many centuries the Weald was so sparsely inhabited
that the Surrey villages under the North Downs, and the Sussex villages
under the South Downs, thrust out long extensions into the forest, a
custom which gave to those parishes a most peculiar shape. They were
drawn into strips, as it were, whose inhabitants dwelt clustered at one
end of the elongated band. A phenomenon of much the same kind is to be
discovered along the St. Lawrence in Canada, where each village
clustered upon the river claims a long strip of hinterland behind it
into the forest of the north.
The line of division between these Surrey parishes, which stretched out
southwards into the forest and these Sussex villages which stretched out
northward to meet them, was probably never clearly defined, and was,
indeed, of little importance. The
[Illustration: MAYFIELD]
[Sidenote: PARISHES OF WEALD]
farther one got from the village church and the group of houses, the
less it mattered under whose jurisdiction one fell, and when, with the
growth of civilisation and the necessity for exact boundaries, a line
was at last drawn, it was drawn somewhat in favour of the Sussex
parishes, whose manorial lords were of greater political importance than
those of Surrey: for the reason that they held the great castles which
defended the south of England. It was, presumably, in this way that the
ribbon of land which lies to the north of the forest ridge came to be
included within the political boundaries of the modern county.
Viewed in the light of such a development from the sea, the topography
of Sussex falls into a comparatively simple scheme.
The whole county is determined by the great line of chalk hills which
stand steep up against the Weald, that is, with their escarpment facing
northward, and which slope gradually towards the sea plain upon the
south in such a fashion, that a section taken anywhere in that range
resembles in form a wave driven forward by the south-west wind and just
about to break over the Weald. It is not the least of the unities which
render Sussex so harmonious that this main range of the South Downs,
which are the strong framework of the whole county, should have all the
appearance of being blown forward into its shape by those Atlantic gales
which also determine the configuration of the trees in the sea-plain and
upon the slopes of the hills.
Were this range of the South Downs to run parallel to the sea throughout
the length of the county the topographical scheme of which we are
speaking could be set forth in very few words. The whole county would
fall at once and without qualification into four long parallel belts:
the sea-plain, the Downs next inland to it, the belt of old villages at
the foot of the Downs to the north (that is, the southern edge of the
Weald), and the forest ridge to the north of the whole. As a fact,
however, these lines, though parallel to one another, are not strictly
parallel to the sea coast; they tilt somewhat from the north-west to the
south-east, so that the plan of the county resembles a piece of stuff
woven in four broad bands which have been cut in bias, or, as the phrase
goes, “on the cross.” Each belt has, therefore, its termination on the
sea. The coastal plain gets narrower and narrower, and comes to an end
at Brighton; the Chalk Downs run into the sea just beyond this point,
and are cut off, in sharp white cliffs all along Seaford Bay, in a
[Illustration: CHICHESTER CROSS]
face of white precipice which culminates at Beachy Head. The southern
Weald and the flats, which run all across the county just north of the
Downs, come to the sea in that great even stretch between Eastbourne and
Hastings for which the general name is Pevensey Level; and, finally, the
somewhat complicated and diversified forest ridge, with its mixture of
clay and sand, runs into the sea in the neighbourhood of Hastings.
[Sidenote: THE FOUR BELTS]
These four great belts may be traced, not only in the relief of the
county, but also in its superficial geology; the sea plain is throughout
of a deep, strong, brown loamy soil, among the most fertile in England,
and fetching by far the highest rents paid anywhere in the county. In
the best of its stretch, between Chichester and Worthing, it is from
four to six miles broad, closely inhabited and, though recently marred
by the growth of a whole string of watering-places, still preserving a
very characteristic life of its own. Except Chichester no town of any
antiquity stands upon it, but it nourishes a great number of prosperous
agricultural villages, the size and the architecture of whose churches
are sufficient to prove their economic condition in the past.
Among the most characteristic of these is Yapton, which is supposed to
be the “tun” or hamlet of Eappa--a comrade of St. Wilfred’s, the
missionary and the first bishop of the county. Lyminster is another
excellent example of what these places were in the past, and its great
church is the more striking from the decay of the parish around it.
The forest ridge (to take the farther boundary first) has, though
somewhat confused, a geological characteristic of its own, for it
consists of sand rising from and mixed with the clay of the Weald. This
clay, in its turn, lying between the forest ridge and the Downs, though
diversified by occasional outcrops of sand, is fairly uniform. From the
beginning it has been covered, not very thickly, but very generally,
with those short, strong oaks which have furnished the timber for all
the old buildings of the county. We will turn later to the question of
whether this stiff and somewhat ungrateful soil of the Weald was ever
wholly uninhabited: in this initial survey it must suffice to remark
that even to-day the development of that soil is difficult. Places
specially favoured with good water have been occupied for centuries, and
form at the present time the market towns of the Weald. The spaces
between them are remarkable
[Illustration: LYMINSTER]
[Sidenote: WATER ON THE WEALD]
for the isolation of their farmhouses, and to-day for the way in which
the Londoner is discovering to his cost the stubborn nature of the
county. Modern invention, and especially the invention of the motor car,
has made this situation tempting enough to townsmen, but the new
buildings which they attempt to found upon places whose desertion is
incomprehensible to them are met with continual difficulties. The water
is often bad, the soil much damper in winter than the summer
promised--for these experiments are nearly always the result of a first
view taken in the height of summer. The long, and often futile, digging
for good water, the cost of pumping it when, if ever, it is found,
combine to make the new attempts at building on the clay of the Weald
grow slacker as time proceeds. There are, however, more grateful
opportunities scattered here and there in those outcrops of sand and
gravel of which I have spoken. Haywards Heath has grown up in this way,
and there are a multitude of villages half-way between the forest ridge
and the Downs which owe the greater part of their beauty to the sharp
contours of the sandstone.
These outcrops have formed centres of population from the very earliest
times, as, for example, at Burton, Egdean, Thakeham, Ashington, and in
many other places.
This belt of clay interspersed with occasional heights of sand, and
lying between the forest ridge and the Downs, is the broadest of the
four; it is rarely less than ten miles in width and often as much as
fifteen. Just between it and the escarpment of the Downs runs a narrow
belt of green-sand, and again, right under the hills, a narrow belt of
loam, which last affords almost the best arable land in this part of the
county. It is this narrow belt of loam which has given their value to a
procession of famous estates under the shadow of the hills, as Heyshott,
where was Cobden’s Farm; Graffham; Lavington, which was Sargent land,
and of which Wilberforce and Manning were in turn the squires; Burton,
which was the first to appear in history; West Burton; Bignor, which the
Romans developed; Bury, upon the Arun. To some extent Parrham, the most
typical of Sussex houses, and Wistons, the best example of the
renaissance, draw their wealth from this narrow belt of loam, as,
farther east, does New Timber, and many another great house. The list
might be extended indefinitely.
This long stretch under the escarpment of the
[Illustration: BURY, FROM THE ARUN]
[Sidenote: THE BRITISH TRACK]
Downs contains, perhaps, the oldest remaining monument of man’s activity
in the county: all the way from Heyshott to Ditchling Beacon, and, as it
is claimed, even right on to Lewes, there runs what is evidently a
prehistoric trackway. Its antiquity is proved by many indications, but
chiefly by this, that it has sunk deep, even into the hardest soils.
There is a point near Sutton, under Cold Harbour Hill, where it is
perhaps twelve feet below the general level of the soil, and there are
many places where it is over six. This old way, which is utilised almost
throughout the whole of its length by modern lanes, links up centres of
population which are as old, one must imagine, as the existence of
mankind in this island. Their names are those which we have just seen in
connection with the great estates to which these villages
belong--Lavington, Bignor, Bury, Amberley, Storrington, Washington,
Steyning, Bramber, Povnings, Fulcking, and so on eastwards to Lewes.
It was not only the fertility of the loam, nor only the proximity of the
Weald for a hunting-ground, that produced these little prehistoric
villages, but also the excellent supply of water.
Sussex is, perhaps, of all the English counties that one in which it is
most difficult to find good water, as we have already seen in speaking
of the Weald, and as we shall see further when we come to talk of the
Chalk Downs. But these little villages, standing as they do just upon
the crack where the chalk (which is permeable and full of water like a
sponge) comes sharp on to the impermeable soil of the Weald, are all fed
by a multitude of delicious running streams filtered through hundreds of
feet of the pure carbon of the hills and bursting out along the old
road. They turn mills, they water orchards and small closes, they spread
into teeming fish-ponds, and have, more than any other cause, created
these little villages. There is hardly one without its stream.
Having reviewed these three belts--the coast-plain, the forest ridge,
and the southern belt of the Weald--it remains for us to describe that
which is by far the most important, namely, the South Downs. It will be
necessary to devote to those hills a closer attention than we have given
to the rest of the county, for one may call them, without much
exaggeration, the county itself. Sussex is Sussex on account of the
South Downs. Their peculiar landscape, their soil, their uniformity,
give the county all its meaning.
* * * * *
[Illustration: SUSSEX HILLS]
[Sidenote: THE CHALK-RANGES]
The principal hill ranges of South England, the Chilterns, the Cotswold,
the Mendips, the North and South Downs, the Dorset Downs, and the
Berkshire Downs, roughly converge upon Salisbury Plain. Of the
importance of that site in the history of our island there is no space
to speak here, but it is necessary to remember the disposition of the
ranges in order to appreciate how great a rôle the South Downs must have
played in the early history of Britain; for they furnished, as did the
other three great chalk ranges (the Dorset Downs, the North Downs, and
the Chilterns, with their continuation in the Berkshire Downs), the main
routes of travel in early times. They were bare of trees, dry, and
fairly even along their summits, and, save in a few places, they
afforded a good view upon either side, so that the traveller could in
primitive times beware of the approach of enemies.
The great mass of chalk which forms the Hampshire Highland splits,
before the eastern boundary of that county is reached, into two
branches; the northern one of these runs through Surrey, straight to the
Medway in Kent, crosses that river, and turns down to meet the sea at
Dover. The southern branch enters the county of Sussex just beyond
Petersfield, and thence eastward forms this range of the South Downs.
There is no other stretch of hills precisely like them in Europe; their
nearest counterpart is that other northern range formed much upon the
same model, and of the same material, which looks at them from thirty
miles away across the Weald. They run in one straight wall for sixty
miles, maintaining throughout that length a similar conformation with a
similar escarpment turned perpetually to the north; a similar absence of
water; a similar presence from place to place of groups of beech-trees
which occasionally crown their highest summits; a similar succession of
comparatively low passes, and a similar though rarer series of what the
people of the county call “gaps,” that is, gorges, or rather rounded
clefts, in which their continuity is completely broken by the passage of
a river. They are the most uniform, the most striking, and the most
individual of all the lower ranges to be discovered in this island or in
neighbouring countries. They might be compared by a traveller to the
line of the Argonne, or to the steep, even hills above the Moselle
before it enters German territory. But they are more of one kind than
are even these united ranges. Coming upon
[Illustration: THE ROTHER]
[Sidenote: NATURE OF SOUTH DOWNS]
them from the north, as so many do now, motoring and bicycling south
from London, their steep, sharp face showing black with the daylight
behind it, is the principal feature of the south-east of England.
Their contours depend, of course, upon the chalk of which they are
built. This lies in regular layers five, six, and sometimes eight
hundred feet deep from their summits to the level of the plain beneath
them. It is weathered into rounded shapes that have no peaks and no
precipices, or at least no precipices save those which man has
deliberately created, where he has dug straight out of their sides for
chalk, or where they meet the sea and are washed into perpendicular
cliffs. These rounded lines of theirs against the sky, when one is
travelling along them, seem in some way to add to their loneliness, and
that loneliness is among the most striking of their features.
They have never been built upon; it is to be believed (and profoundly to
be hoped) they never will be built upon. The depth to which wells have
to be sunk before water can be found is so great as to check any
experiment of this kind. There is in the whole skyline, from Petersfield
right to Beachy Head, not a single human habitation to break the noble
aspect of these hills against the sky save one offensive shed, or what
not, just north of Brighton where, it may be presumed, the economic
powers of vulgarism are too strong even for the Downs.
Cultivation is also very rare upon them. They are covered with a short,
dense, and very sweet turf suited to the famous flocks of sheep which
browse upon them, and of little value for any other agricultural purpose
than the pasturage thus afforded.
Those who best know the Downs and have lived among them all their lives
can testify how, for a whole day’s march, one may never meet a man’s
face; or if one meets it, it will be the face of some shepherd who may
be standing lonely with his dog beside him upon the flank of the green
hill and with his flock scattered all around. The isolation of these
summits is the more remarkable from the pressure of population which is
growing so rapidly to the south of them, and which is beginning to
threaten the Weald to their north. But no modern change seems to affect
the character of these lonely stretches of grass, and it may be noted
with satisfaction that, when those ignorant of the nature of Sussex
attempt to violate the security of the Downs, that experiment of theirs
is commonly attended with misfortune.
[Illustration: COLD WALTHAM]
[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX RIVERS]
Thus an open space of park-land beyond Madehurst invited the eye of a
very wealthy man (presumably from the north) somewhat more than a
century ago. He had not, indeed, the folly to build upon the crest of
the hills, but he built not far from their summits for the pleasure that
the view afforded him. The house was large and pretentious. To this day
it depends for its water upon chance rains, and in the drought it pays
for water as one may have to do for any other valuable thing.
We have seen that the unison of the Downs is broken by a certain number
of regular gaps--the valleys, that is, of the Wealden rivers. For the
rivers of Sussex, by an accident which geologists have attempted to
explain, are not determined by the rise of these great hills, but on the
contrary cut right through them from the Weald to the sea. The Arun,
from the Wealden town of Pulborough to its seaport of Littlehampton, the
little Adur from various sources round by Shipley and Cuckfield to its
harbour town of Shoreham, the Ouse from the Wealden town of Uckfield to
its harbour town of Newhaven, all cut right through the chalk hills and
form narrow, level valleys of alluvial soil between one section of the
Downs and the next.
These valleys where they cut through the Downs were never used for
roads before modern times. The good road along the little Adur to
Shoreham is fairly old, but it must be remembered that at this point the
Downs come very close to the sea. Along the Ouse and along the Arun no
road was attempted until quite lately. There does now exist, and perhaps
has existed for two or three hundred years past, a road from Lewes to
the mouth of the Ouse, but even to-day there is none along the Arun
valley. The soil was too marshy for such a road to be constructed in
early times, and the dry hill-way once fixed and metalled has become the
only permanent road to Arundel.
The afforesting of the range of the Downs is worthy of remark. The woods
are of two kinds--those that crown the foot-hills towards the sea and
here and there the high slopes of the Downs themselves, and those that
have caught on to the slight alluvial drift of the hollows. In both
cases they are principally of beech, while in the open around them,
along the old tracks and clinging to the crest of the escarpments, are
lines of very ancient and somewhat stunted yews. In both cases, whether
over the round of the hills or in their hollows, the Sussex woods are
somewhat limited in extent and fairly clear of undergrowth. Through all
the forest
[Illustration: FITTLEWORTH BRIDGE]
[Sidenote: THE BEECH AND THE YEW]
known as the Nore Wood a man can ride his horse in pretty well any
direction without following a path; the same is true of Houghton Forest
and of the other large woods of the Downs. This ease they owe to two
things: first, the character of the beech-trees, which forms under its
branches a thick bed of mast, out of which but few spears of greenery
will show; and, secondly, that quality of the chalk by which (to the
salvation of Sussex!) it is but slightly fertile, and by which it
therefore preserves itself intact from the invasion of man. Indeed, it
is remarkable that the two trees of the Downs, the yew and the beech,
both make for a clear soil, and there is a proverb in those parts--
Under the Beech and th’ Yow
Nowt’ll grow.
The valleys of the Downs differ very much according to whether they are
upon the south or upon the north of the range. Those to the south are
valleys of erosion, shallow, broad, and funnel-shaped, with their wide
mouths opening towards the sea and the south-west wind. They are usually
called _Stenes_,--a word which is sometimes spelt “_Steine_,”--the best
known of which hollows is the valley running through Brighton. There are
any number between that point and Goodwood. In their lower parts they
support farmhouses, and occasionally they carry one of the great roads
which cross the Downs from the north. They are wind-swept, and hold the
snow very late; but in summer they are among the most sheltered corners
of South England.
Upon the north the steep escarpment of the hills forbids any such
conformation. Here the valleys take the shape of very steep hollows of a
horseshoe outline known as _combes_, a Celtic word, and frequently hung
with deep woods which are known both here and in Kent (and in other
parts of the south country) as _hangers_. The most sombre and the most
silent of these are perhaps those of Burton, Lavington, and Bury.
The woods upon the slopes, the foot-hills, and the summits are of a
different order. Those upon the actual crests are commonly artificial,
and are known as “clumps” or “rings.” The Dukes of Richmond have planted
a few such near Goodwood, but the most famous is the great landmark of
Chanctonbury Ring, above Wiston, which is a resting-point for the eye
not only up and down forty miles of the Channel, but also up and down
forty miles of the opposing northern range. The woods of the foot-hills
and of the slopes are, on the
[Illustration: NEAR COATES]
[Sidenote: DEW PANS]
contrary, primeval--as can be proved from the absence beneath them of
Roman or prehistoric remains.
It has already been remarked that the hydrographical system of the South
Downs is a peculiar one, that the rivers of Sussex are in no way
determined as to their courses by that range of hills, and that the
heights themselves are devoid of water, because all that falls upon them
percolates through the chalk and does not spring out again until it
finds the clay at their base. But there is upon the Downs a traditional
method of water-getting handed down, perhaps, from prehistoric times
when the camps of refuge, of which we shall speak in a moment, were hard
put to it to water their garrisons. This method is the formation of dew
pans. A space is hollowed out, preferably towards the summit of a hill.
It is circular and shallow in form, and is coated with some impermeable
substance--to-day, usually, with concrete. In a very short time this pan
will fill with the dew and the rain, and in such a pond, if its
dimensions are sufficiently large, there will but rarely be lack of
water after it is once formed. It is true that no great strain is laid
upon them, though the present writer does know of one case, outside the
boundaries of the county, where a large one has been constructed to
supply all the needs of a considerable household.
A further matter which every one who is familiar with them must have
remarked upon the Downs, is the presence of numerous earthworks raised
apparently for defence, and often of very great size. The classical
instances of these and the most perfect examples are upon Mount Caburn
and Cissbury, one of the foot-hills towards the sea, upon which research
has proved that the prehistoric, the Roman, and the barbarian pirate
inhabitants have lived in succession. Here was discovered that regular
manufactory of flint instruments which is among the most curious prizes
of modern prehistoric research, and here also Roman and Saxon ornaments
have been found succeeding those of the neolithic men.
But though Cissbury is the most perfect, it is but one of very many
similar camps. There is hardly one of the greater summits of the Downs
that does not bear traces of these enclosures, and upon some of the
hills, notably east of Ambery and again east of Bramber, they are as
perfect as they are enormous. There can be little doubt that they were
created for the purposes of defence, and the late General Pitt-Rivers
conducted an
[Sidenote: THE TUMULI]
exhaustive inquiry into the number of men that would be required to
garrison them, upon their structure, positions, and numbers in this and
other countries. But the historical, or rather prehistoric problem which
they present does not end with the discovery of their original use, for
it is difficult to understand, first, where the multitudes can have come
from which sufficed to man such considerable embankments; and, secondly,
where provision, and above all water, can have been found for such
garrisons; for though, as we have seen, the dew pans will always furnish
water in certain amounts, they would never have sufficed for the large
numbers which alone could hold from half-a-mile to a mile of rampart and
ditch.
Associated with these old camps are the tumuli to be found throughout
the whole length of the Downs, especially upon their main ridge. But the
reader who is interested in such things must be warned against accepting
too uncritically the evidence of the Ordnance Survey upon this matter.
In the majority of cases it is right, especially with regard to the very
interesting group of tombs just beyond the kennels at Upwaltham, above
the Chichester road where it crosses the Downs at Duncton Hill; but
there is at least one case, and there are probably others, where the
heaps of material accumulated in the making of the roads have been
erroneously ascribed to our prehistoric ancestors, and, if the present
writer is not mistaken, there is an error of this kind marked upon the
map close to the new London road which climbs Bury Hill on its way to
cross the Downs at Whiteways Lodge.
The complete isolation of these heights, their loneliness, and their
wild charm, is enhanced by a line of towns and of villages especially
dependent upon them and standing at their feet towards the south. The
northern line of villages which lies just under their escarpment on the
edge of the Weald, which we have described as being probably prehistoric
sites, and which are connected by what has certainly been a prehistoric
road, are not directly made by or dependent upon the Downs themselves.
Their farmers are not usually large sheep farmers; their shepherds are
few; their lives and their industries are those of the plain; their
building materials are oak and plaster; their inhabitants but rarely
climb the very steep hillsides immediately above them. The villages and
towns to the _south_, on the contrary, owe their very existence to the
Downs, and show in their every aspect the
[Illustration: AMBERLEY VILLAGE]
[Sidenote: THE SOUTHERN FORT-HILLS]
influence of the range which backs them and by which they live. From
these villages proceed the principal flocks of sheep; in one of them,
Findon, is the principal sheep fair of the country. Their plough lands
are commonly poor, from the admixture of the last slopes of the chalk;
their wealth is in flocks and in folds. In the Middle Ages they added to
this the pannage which the beech mast of their woods afforded to swine.
Right along from the Hampshire border to where the Downs fall into the
sea beyond Brighton, from Goodwood that is, through Halnaecker, Eartham,
Slindon, Arundel, Angmering, Lancing, to Rottingdeane--or rather to what
Rottingdeane used to be before the æsthetes turned it pure Cockney
twenty years ago--runs this row of little ancient places which are the
typical Sussex homes of all.
They grew up, as did those others of which we have spoken, where water
could be found, and also, it may be presumed, where there was some local
opportunity for defence now forgotten; the growth of Arundel certainly
depended upon these two factors, to some extent probably that of Slindon
(which centres round its great pond), and it may be supposed that of
Lancing as well.
In their architecture these villages are, as it were, a physical
outgrowth of the Downs. The oak, which one sees so commonly in the
Weald, is but rarely present here; the roofs are of thatch, the walls of
flint.
Flint is, of course, the stone of the chalk, and the supply is unfailing
because, by a curious phenomenon which has never been thoroughly
explained, no matter how many flints are taken from the surface of the
soil, others continue to “sweat up” through the chalk and to take the
places of those that have been removed; there is never for very long a
lack of surface flints in the fields adjoining these villages. There are
some such villages in which every old building without exception, even
the squire’s house and the church, are entirely built of flint, as are
the boundary walls of the parks and of the farms. The material has,
however (at least in the constructions of the last few centuries), one
great defect, which is that the mortar does not bind it as strongly as
it will bind brick or stone. This defect has been explained as being due
to the extremely hard nature of the silex, for to bind material together
it is essential that the binding flux, the mortar, should penetrate more
or less into the pores of that which it binds, and for this reason brick
and stone are
[Sidenote: FLINT-BUILDING]
wetted before being laid upon the mortar. Obviously no wetting can be of
the least use where one is dealing with flint. Nevertheless, the old
work of the country is singularly enduring. Of this a first-rate example
is afforded to the traveller by the one great slab of wall which is all
that remains of Bramber Castle. Here is a piece of masonry standing
perpendicularly for perhaps fifty feet in height, not particularly
thick, made entirely of flint, and yet standing upright in spite of
sieges and artillery fire, the destruction of all its supports, and the
passage of at least six hundred years.
It would be for an expert to discuss what were the causes of this
superior excellence in the older work; but it may be suggested by one
who has looked closely into several specimens of mediæval
flint-building, that two rules were almost invariably observed by our
ancestors before the Reformation. The first was to preserve as carefully
as possible the natural casing or “skin” of hardened chalk which
surrounds every large flint, and to have none of the smooth stone
surface showing except on the outside of the wall. The second was to use
nothing but the fine sand which the county affords so plentifully in the
mixing of the mortar. It may be, of course, that here, as in so many
other cases, the argument applies that we merely imagine the older work
to be better because the best of it alone survives, but it is at least
remarkable that hardly any flint work of the last three hundred years
has come down without some distortion from the perpendicular.
A very marked way of handling this stone is the cutting of the outer
surface. This treatment is not peculiar to Sussex; it is to be found in
East Anglia and in other parts of England where flints are common, but
it is perhaps more general in Sussex than elsewhere, and may have
originated in this county. The separate dressing of so many small stones
is an expensive matter, and it is probably the very expense which is so
incurred, or rather the great expenditure of energy connoted by the
appearance of such work, which impresses and is designed to impress the
spectator of it. Perhaps the most perfect specimen of a modern sort is
the great house at West Deane; but all those who love their county are
pleased to remark that in the new work at Arundel Castle this true
Sussex style has been observed.
There is but one further point to be remarked with regard to the Downs
country, and that is the nature of the communication across the hills.
[Illustration: BRAMBER CASTLE]
[Sidenote: THE PASSES]
It has already been said that the main river valleys were not much used
for such communications; that there is no case of both sides of one of
the river gaps being so used throughout the whole length of the county;
and that there is but one case of a road following a river before modern
times (the case of the old road from Bramber to Shoreham); while to this
day (it will be remembered) the Arun valley is utilised by nothing but
the railway.
Crossings from north to south in Sussex, from the Weald to the
sea-plain, are therefore invariably carried over the crest of the hills,
and it is a matter for some astonishment that in a county so near
London, and to reach a district so thickly populated and so wealthy as
is the South Coast, the passages should be so few. With the exception of
the Falmer Road from Lewes to Brighton (which can hardly be said to
cross the main range), there are but five roads leading from the Weald
to the sea-plain. The main Brighton Road which goes over Clayton Hill,
the Worthing Road over Washington, the Arundel Road over Bury, the
Chichester Road over Duncton, and the second Chichester Road over
Cocking.
The uniformity of type which distinguishes the Downs causes all these
roads to take much the same section: they choose a low saddle in the
range (the Arundel Road is something of an exception here, for the
saddle of Bury Hill is a high one); they rise up very sharply to the
summit and then fall easily away towards the sea-plain; and though
Cocking Hill is perhaps the shortest, Bury Hill the longest, of the
five, it is an error to attempt, as do many who are insufficiently
acquainted with the county, to avoid the steepness of the ascent by
taking a detour. All or any one of these roads will try the traveller or
the machine which he uses, and it must be remembered that these five are
the only roads of any sort which cross the Downs. Many a track marked as
crossing them is, when one comes to pursue it, nothing but a “ride” of
grass in no way different from the rest of the grass of the Downs. All
these roads have, however, one advantage attached to them, which is the
astonishing view of the coastal plain which greets one from their
summits, especially the view from Whiteways and the sudden and
unexpected panorama at Benges, which is the second and highest summit of
the Duncton Hill Road.
* * * * *
This topographical division of our subject cannot
[Illustration: SOUTH HARTING]
[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX RIVERS]
be concluded without a more particular description of the Sussex rivers.
Of these the first in importance and the largest is the Arun. It rises
in a lake which is little known, and which is yet of great beauty, in
St. Leonard’s Forest, runs as a small and very winding stream through
Horsham and the northern Wealden parts of the county, and only begins to
acquire the importance of a true river in the neighbourhood of Stopham.
Here it is crossed by an old bridge which is itself among the most
beautiful structures of the county, and which spans the river at one of
its broadest and most secluded reaches. It is also the true dividing
line between the Upper and the Lower Arun, because it is the extreme
limit that the tide has ever reached even under the most favourable
circumstances of high springs and drought. Just below Stopham there
falls into the Arun a little river called the Rother, or Western Rother,
to distinguish it from the Eastern Rother which is the principal stream
at the other end of the county. This little river, which was canalised
and usable for traffic until, like all the rest of our waterways, it was
killed by the railroads, waters a most charming valley strung with towns
and villages whose names we have already mentioned in another
connection. At its head is the millpond of Midhurst; it runs through
the land of Cowdray (which is the great park of Midhurst), past Burton
Rough, south of Petworth, where it turns one of its several mills, and
on past Coates and Fittleworth, where it runs close to that inn which
most English artists know, and the panels of whose coffee-room have been
painted in landscapes by such various hands.
When the Rother has thus fallen into the Arun, the two streams uniting
run beneath the houses of Pulborough, and under its bridge, of which the
reader will hear more when we come to speak of the historical
development of the county; for this was the spot at which the great
Roman road which united London with the coastal plain crossed the Arun,
and the foundations of Pulborough are almost certainly Roman.
From the little hill upon which this town stands one looks south across
a great expanse of dead level meadow, flanked with sandy hills of pine,
towards the dark line of the Downs. The river turns and makes for these,
aiming at the gap which cuts them clean in two just south of Amberley.
Often during the year these flats are covered with floods, and as the
river is embanked and the entry of water through the meadows can be
regulated by sluices,
[Illustration: THE SWAN HOTEL, FITTLEWORTH]
[Sidenote: ARUNDEL GAP]
the pasturage of these flooded levels is of great value. The stream
rolls on, more and more turbid with the advent of the tide, spreads out
into the willow thickets of Amberley Wildbrook where there is good
shooting of snipe, runs on right under Bury, leaving Amberley Castle
upon the left, passes beneath the causeway and the bridge at Houghton,
and so enters the Arundel Gap. Here it is completely lonely. There are
not even small footpaths by which the villages of this narrow valley can
be reached from the north, though their names of “Southstoke” and
“Northstoke” indicate an early passage of some sort, for this place-name
throughout South England refers to the “staking” by which the passage of
a river was made firm. Two new dykes, cutting off long corners, have
been dug in the course of this valley, and they take the main stream,
while the old river runs in a narrow and sluggish course by a long
detour towards Burpham. The main channel, as it now exists, continues to
keep to the right hand side of the valley, where it is continually
overhung by the deep woods of Arundel Park; and at last, a little below
the Blackrabbit Inn, one sees, jutting out like a spur from the bulk of
the hills, the great mass of the Castle.
The attitude of Arundel, standing above the river at this point, is
hardly to be matched by any of the river towns of England. It stands up
on its steep bank looking right down upon the tidal stream and towards
the sea. The houses are natural to the place (the hideous new
experiments upon the further bank are hidden from the river), and all
the roofs are either old or at least consonant to the landscape, while
the situation chosen for St. Philip’s Church, and its architecture,
happen by an accident that is almost unknown in modern work, to be
exactly suited to the landscape of which it forms the crown, and to
balance the background of the Castle and the Keep.
Below the bridge at Arundel the Arun becomes a purely maritime river. It
runs in a deep tidal channel with salt meadows upon either side, and
with a very violent tide of great height scouring between its
embankments. There are no buildings directly upon its sides save one
poor lonely inn and church at Ford, and in seven miles it reaches the
sea at Littlehampton, pouring into the Channel over one of the
shallowest and most dangerous bars upon this coast.
The other rivers merit a much briefer attention.
The Adur is but a collection of very small
[Illustration: ARUNDEL CASTLE (EVENING)]
[Sidenote: THE ADUR]
streams which meet in the water meadows above Henfield, where it becomes
a broad ditch; it cannot be called a true river until it is close upon
the hill of Bramber within a few miles of the sea. It is, in fact, a
sort of miniature Arun, but its effect in history has been almost as
great as that of the larger river, as we shall see farther on, for it
also has pierced its own gap through the Downs, and this gap has been,
like Arundel, from the earliest times one of the avenues of invasion,
and therefore one of the strong places for defence. It runs through this
gap, past two delightful and almost unknown relics of mediæval England,
parishes that have decayed until they are merely small chapels attached
to lonely farms (their names are Coombes and Buttolphs), and comes to
where its mouth used to be, at old Shoreham, where was a Roman
landing-place, and where the Saxons are said first to have landed also.
But the river has built up between itself and the sea a great beach of
shingle. Its mouth has gone travelling farther and farther down along
the coast, and, had not modern work arrested this process, there
probably would have happened to Shoreham what has happened to Orford
upon the East Coast. For Orford was also once a great mediæval harbour,
the mouth of which has drifted farther and farther off and silted up as
it travelled.
The Adur will perhaps cut its largest figure in literature from the fact
that it has been the occasion of one of the most ridiculous pieces of
pedantry which even modern archæology has fallen into. A statement has
been made (it has been taken seriously in our universities) that the
Adur had no name until about 200 years ago, that the name it now bears
was given it by Camden the historian, and that the Sussex peasants took
the title of their river humbly from a writer of books, and have
continued to use an artificial and foreign word! If anything were
required to prove that a contention of this sort was nonsense it would
be enough to point out that the word Adur is, like so many of our Sussex
names, Celtic in its origin, and means, like so many Celtic names for
rivers, “the water”; it is the same as the southern French name Adour.
The third river, the Ouse, also bears a Celtic name. It is somewhat
larger than the Adur, but considerably smaller than the Arun. Like the
Adur it flows from insignificant streams until it gets to its water
meadows near Lewes, and also like the Adur it has cut its gap through
the Downs,
[Illustration: THE TOWN CLOCK, STEYNING]
[Sidenote: THE OUSE]
and has therefore created a point of high strategical importance in the
fortified hill of Lewes. But, unlike the Adur, the maritime portion of
its course is of some length, and during these eight miles or so between
Lewes and the mouth at Newhaven it rather resembles the lower part of
the Arun. It has the same treeless, marshy sides, highly embanked for
the formation of water meadows, the same strong, scouring tide, the same
violent current, but, luckily for the London, Brighton, and South Coast
Railway, not the same bar. The entry at Newhaven is particularly easy,
the best in the county, and would be fairly easy even without the
dredging that is carried on, or the breakwater that defends it from the
south-west.
These three rivers between them form the main hydrographical features of
the centre of the county; their three harbours standing at almost
exactly regular intervals are the sole entries to the west and middle of
Sussex; the three gaps in the Downs behind those harbours are the three
gates to South England from the sea; the three castles that defend those
gaps complete the significance of the series.
The Cuckmere is but a very small stream coming out just beyond Newhaven
with Seaford at its mouth, and would be scarcely worth mentioning were
it not for the fact that, like its larger sisters, it shows that
singular capacity for cutting right down through the chalk hills and
making a gap through which it can pass to the sea.
This feature, which is common to the Sussex rivers, is also discovered
in the streams which cross the northern chalk range into the Thames
valley. These also are three in number--the Wey, the Mole, and the
Darent. And it is conjectured by scientists that these three rivers,
like those other three in Sussex, the Arun, the Adur, and the Ouse, run
independent of the chalk hills, and cut through them from the following
cause: the Wealden heights, the forest ridge that is, in which all six
take their rise, is conceived to be geologically much older than the
North or the South Downs, and it is presumed that the rivers had already
formed their valleys, and were already beginning to erode the surface of
the land before the chalk hills began to arise, so that as the Downs
gradually rose the little rivers continued their sawing, and kept to
their original level while the great heaps of white shell which were
building up our hills rose upon either side of their valleys. This
theory, unfortunately, like most scientific theories, and especially
geological ones, is traversed by another theory equally
[Illustration: THE ROTHER AT FITTLEWORTH]
[Sidenote: THE EASTERN ROTHER]
reputable and stoutly maintained by precisely the same authorities, to
wit, that the shells of which the Chalk Downs are composed are those of
marine animals and were laid down under the sea. If this was the case it
is impossible to see how the little rivers can have continued their
erosion while the chalk hills were rising upon either side, for no
rivers run along the bottom of the sea. The fact is that this, like
ninety-nine out of a hundred other geological theses, reposes upon mere
guesswork; we have no evidence worth calling evidence to tell us how the
contours of the land were moulded.
The last of the Sussex rivers stands quite outside the scheme of those
with which we have been hitherto dealing. It is the Eastern Rother,
which rises, indeed, on the same Wealden heights as the others, but does
not encounter the chalk hills, for these come to an end west of it in
the cliff of Beachy Head. The Eastern Rother runs, therefore, not
through a gap but a wide plain, which is marked off on the coast-line by
the flats of the marshes before Dunge Ness.
This little river nourishes no considerable town, but a great number of
very charming villages stand either upon it or above it; others also
less charming, as for instance the somewhat theatrical village of
Burwash, whose old church tower, avenue of trees, and Georgian houses,
have bred a crop of red-brick villas.
Robertsbridge, however, is a paradise for any one, and contains or did
contain in the cellars of its principal inn, the George, some of the
best port at its price to be found in England. Within the drainage area
of this river also stands (upon the Brede, a tributary) the height which
was known until the Norman invasion as “Hastings Plain,” but has, since
the great conflict, supported the abbey and the village of Battle. The
harbour mouth of this river is the town of Rye, a haven which it is
still possible to make, though with difficulty, but which was until
quite the last few generations a trading-place of importance.
With the mention of the Eastern Rother our survey of the river system of
Sussex must close, for, though tributaries of the Wey rise within the
political boundaries of the county, while the source of the Mole is also
within those boundaries, their systems properly belong to the Thames
valley and to Surrey.
We have now some idea of the general configuration of the county, of the
nature of its
[Illustration: RYE]
[Sidenote: GENERAL VIEW OF THE COUNTY]
landscape and its soil, and of the relief upon which it is built. The
reader may perhaps grasp in one glance the Wealden heights running along
the northern horizon, the wide rolling belt of the clay weald between
those heights and the Downs broken here and there by rocks and
sandstone, patched with pines, the Downs themselves running in one vast
wall for their fifty or sixty miles of stretch from the Hampshire border
to Beachy Head, and the coastal plain to the south of them. There have
also been indicated in this first part of the book, though briefly, the
various types of towns and villages and buildings which these four belts
produce; it has been shown how the parallelism of all the four tilts
somewhat from the north-west to the south-east, so that all four end at
last upon the sea; and it has been shown how the rivers run from the
Weald, cut right through the Downs, and form along the coast the main
harbours of the county.
With such a general plan before us we can go on to speak more
particularly of the history upon which modern Sussex reposes, and to
describe in more detail the towns and the sites connected with the story
of this countryside: of Chichester which was its spiritual capital;
Arundel, Bramber, and Lewes, which were its defences; Midhurst,
Petworth, Pulborough, Horsham, Steyning, Uckfield, and the rest, which
are still its Wealden market towns; its six ancient harbours, and the
recent change which more numerous roads and more rapid methods of
locomotion have begun to bring upon the county, not wholly for its
good.
[Illustration: CHURCH STREET, STEYNING]
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]
PART III
THE INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER OF SUSSEX AND THE WAY TO SEE THE COUNTY
The efforts which many have made to describe a peculiar Sussex dialect
and peculiar Sussex methods of architecture, have been somewhat too
laborious. The example of other counties, notably of Devonshire, which
did possess a strictly defined local dialect and set of customs, has
tempted the patriotic historian of Sussex to find in that county
something which is not there. There is, indeed, a South country way of
speaking as all the world knows. It is to be found in the valley of
Meon, and it is to be found in Kent, and it is to be found in the
southern parts of Surrey. It occupies a large region, whose boundaries
are very vague and ill defined; it lies, roughly speaking, between the
North Downs and the sea, and is bounded westward by the New Forest. It
is not peculiar to the county of Sussex.
For example: A Sussex man will call a woodpecker a “yaffle,” which is a
name taken from its peculiar call--it is for all the world like a mad
laugh. Or again, he will talk of “steening a well,” that is, lining it
with bricks. Or again, he will call a toad stool a “puck” stool. He will
speak of a ploughshare as a “tourn vour,” that is, a “turn furrow”; and
so forth. But these phrases are to be heard all up and down the district
which I have mentioned. And the termination of place names, the peculiar
epithet by which a steep wood is called a “hanger,” or a horseshoe
depression in the Downs a “coombe,” though very Sussex, are not only
Sussex.
So it is with the South country architecture, notably with the building
of those fine “headed” chimneys which are its distinguishing feature.
You will find them all along the valley of the Medway and of the
Derwent, or the Stour, as much as you will find them in the valleys of
the Arun or the Adur.
It is not in the establishment of a Sussex folklore, dialect, or
architecture, that the peculiar and individual spirit of the county is
best discovered. It is rather in the character of its inhabitants. And
this again is fairly sharply divided between the eastern half of the
county and the western.
[Illustration: HIGH STREET, EAST GRINSTEAD]
[Sidenote: EFFECT OF THE IRONSTONE]
The East of Sussex, it seems fair to conjecture, has always been
influenced by the presence of iron. The iron is no longer worked, but
anywhere in the higher parts of the Eastern Weald one finds one’s self
treading upon ironstone, and one sees the streams running red with the
ore, and until so late as the Napoleonic Wars the exploitation of Sussex
iron was continued. It is perhaps on account of this tradition and its
effect upon the inhabitants that East Sussex has, as contrasted with
West, a livelier, and (in the impression of the West) a less pleasing
manner. Though it is farther from London in actual distance, it is
nearer London in feeling. The proximity of Kent, with its great
international highroad running through the heart of it, may have
something to do with this. So also has the early clearing of the forest,
and therefore the early establishment of free communication with the
Thames valley. This feature we have already touched on in the
development of Pevensey and Hastings Rapes. But whatever be the cause,
the effect is apparent to those who know the county. One very curious
result of it to-day is the difference in the modern settlement of East
Sussex and of West. The new-comers with their villas and their great
search for something old, that they may destroy it by their admiration,
have different chances in the two parts of the county. In the West they
can form, as it were, islands which stand alone in the midst of a highly
resisting environment. They will build you a Haywards Heath which is
like a London suburb, or a Ditchling or a Burgess Hill which is another
such line of new houses, or those towns on the sea coast of which we
have spoken, or the little group of red brick which defaces the
landscape of West Horsham, or the lump which is beginning to destroy
Barnham. But these encampments are tied close to the railway; they do
not seem to spread their influence over the landscape or to change the
character of the people in any way.
In East Sussex you get, on the contrary, whole belts of country into
which the spirit of the great towns has penetrated, perhaps for ever.
Thus there is such a belt in the line of Rotherfield, Mayfield, and
Heathfield. There is another stretch east and west from the height of
Heathfield to the valley of the Rother, and notably in a village
which we have already mentioned for its bad eminence in this
respect--Burwash--which is just such a place as the Londoner or the
Colonial calls “old world.” It is a village now only too conscious
[Illustration: COTTAGES AT MAYFIELD]
[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX PEASANT]
of such a character and ready to exploit it for all it is worth. You
have another example of this blight upon the top of Crowborough, which
might as well be Hazlemere or Hindhead for all the South country feeling
that is left to it.
The resistant quality of which we have just made mention, and which is
especially discoverable in the western part of the county, is perhaps
the most remarkable and, under modern circumstances, the most pleasing
of the characteristics of the people. To those who have not been brought
up in the county it becomes but slowly apparent. Those who know Sussex
and its people take a somewhat cynical delight in observing that power
at work. There is no peasant in the world so rooted in his customs and
so determined to maintain them as is the Sussex peasant. He has been
despoiled of his lands; he has been exploited by farmers from every
other county, who come to use his rich belts of loam; he has been
virtually bought or sold by families utterly out of the Sussex tradition
(the Wyndhams, for example), or what is worse, Colonials and random rich
men who make themselves great by the purchase of an ancient estate with
whose traditional history they have not the remotest sympathy. He is,
one would say, without defences against the modern world. But the
modern world, as it is represented by the chance rich men who are now
his masters, will very soon learn that the pressure of that proletariat
is too much for them and not they for it. A Sussex man will not plant
early. You may pay him to do so, and if you pay him enough he will do so
once or twice; but before you have your garden many years, you will find
he is planting again at his accustomed dates. He will not use silos. You
may prove to him in a thousand ways that he would be the richer for
using them. You may pay him as your servant such a wage that he may
begin using them, but his abhorrence of a new method of that sort will
express itself in the result, that you will lose a great deal of money
by your experiment. He will hatch no eggs in an incubator, he will keep
no bees in a new-fangled hive. He will give his pigs too much barley
meal if he can get it, and will remark when he has done so that pigs do
not really pay. He will bargain in his traditional fashion if you send
him to market, and you will not by any payment or pressure cause him to
express dissent in any other manner than by silence.
It will be of interest to watch the near future and to see if his
characteristics can be retained as
[Sidenote: SUSSEX PRONUNCIATION]
the county gets better and better known, and more thoroughly spoiled by
the advent of what is called the leisured class. So far those who have
been able to watch this peasant for the last thirty years have seen very
little change indeed. And even the noble and rich south country accent,
which education was to have destroyed, is as perfect in the little
children of the last few years as in the mouths of the oldest men. And
that peculiar emphasis upon the latter syllable--Amber_ley_,
Billings_hurst_, and the rest--has not disappeared, at least in the
western half of the county.
A test may be applied by those who care to watch the progress of social
disease and the resisting power of a social organism. Throughout the
county the termination “ham” is kept separate, as though by a hyphen,
from the first part of a place-name. For example: Bosham is pronounced
Boz-ham or Boss-ham. To be accurate, the sound is a little between “s”
and “z,” but the “ham” is kept quite distinct. Or again, the name of
Felpham, near Bognor (where William Blake indulged his eccentricities),
is pronounced Felp-ham. Now it is evident that in many cases where a “t”
or an “s” or a “p” comes before “h,” any one not acquainted with this
local method of pronouncing the words would run the two consonants
together, and would pronounce Bosham “Bo_sh_-am,” or Felpham
“Fel_f_-am.” Horsham has already broken down. Two generations ago
everybody called the town Hors-ham. It became a considerable railway
station. Many were led to read the name who had never heard of the
little county town until the railway was built. Its own inhabitants did
not defend the traditional pronunciation with sufficient vigour, and
Hor_sh_-’m it has now fallen to be in spite of the most vigorous efforts
of those who love their county to restore its original and significant
name, and in spite of the fact that a horse even in Horsham is not yet a
Horsh. If Bosham, Felpham, and the rest go in the same way, then one may
take it that Sussex will not be Sussex any more. The test is small, but
it is absolutely determining.
After the characteristic Sussex manner there should be considered the
characteristic Sussex landscape. This has been dealt with at some length
in various parts of the book when we were speaking of the Downs, the
Weald, and the coastal plain, and of particular towns. But we will here
consider it by itself as a mark of the county.
There are two elements in the landscape of Sussex, the first of which is
more permanent than any
[Sidenote: THE MAIN LANDSCAPE]
other similar character, perhaps, in England; the second of which is
more changeable than most. It is not easy to give a name to these
separate elements, but with the one are connected the emotions aroused
by the great views which Sussex presents, and with the other are
connected the emotions aroused by its hollow and secluded places, those
little isolated hills of sand and their small lonely valleys.
The great spaces of landscape which Sussex can afford have never changed
and never can. No man will ever build largely upon the Downs. No forest
will ever gather on so valuable a soil as that of the coastal plain. No
mere extension of buildings or further cultivation will destroy the
distant aspect of the Weald.
A man looking down from the crest of the Downs to the south and to the
north of him sees much of what his ancestry have seen since men first
stood upon those hills. The Weald was once a little denser in wood, the
coastal plain a little less thick with villages, but that is all. The
high, broad belt of the sea has always made a frame for that view. The
flooded river valleys have always picked it out with patches of silver.
The roll of the Downs has always stood, like a monstrous green wave,
blown forward before the south-west wind. The simple and vivid green of
the turf, and the sharp white chalk pits, have always stood making the
same contrast with the sky and the large sailing clouds; and they will
continue to do so for ever.
A Sussex man recognises his home when he sees it from the height above
Eden Bridge, or from Crowborough top as he enters the county from the
north or from the Surrey hills; he knows it when, as he gazes
southwards, he catches along the horizon the dark wall of the Downs. The
outline is not to be confounded with any other in the world, and these
few simple planes of vision build up for him the major pleasures which
the landscape of his county can afford. They have not changed in the
past and they will not change in the future.
With the homelands, with the little valleys and the sandy rocks of the
Weald, and the hills between the foot-hills of the southern side of the
Downs, the case is different.
What the original aspect of these hollows with their clayey or sandy
knolls on either side may have been in the beginnings of the county it
is now very difficult to conjecture. They are certainly among the very
first of its inhabited places, and it is perhaps most accurate to think
of them as little packed groups of huts along the
[Illustration: CROWBOROUGH HEATH]
[Sidenote: THE PINES]
stream which almost invariably flows beneath the small steep hillside,
these huts surrounded by the pasture of the small pastoral community,
and on the upland above by long stretches of open furze and fern. It is
probable that the wooding of the knolls came later, and it is remarkable
that there is very little ancient plough land in the neighbourhood of
most of these villages. Within the last few hundred years their general
aspect has completely changed through the introduction of the pine.
Along the whole belt of sand from Elsted right away to the valley of the
Ouse you get bunches of this tree, making a peculiar note in the
landscape; and the same is true of the forest ridge to the north.
It is not easy to determine at what date this foreign timber first
invaded the county. It is certainly not Roman, and almost certainly it
was not to be discovered in Sussex during the sixteenth century. The
Elizabethan cottage of the Weald has oak for its material, and this not
only on account of the strength of such wood, but obviously because it
was the cheapest and commonest kind of timber; for instance, the thin
lathes or strips to which the smallest tiles are affixed are of oak in
the old houses as much as are the tie beams and the main rafters. We
should hardly find this if the pine had been present in Sussex during
that great period of activity in domestic building; for the wood of the
pine was far easier to split and to work where great strength was not
required. It is thought by some that the tree came in, with all other
Scotch things, in the time of James I. But it must be repeated, the
point is undetermined. At any rate it has completely transformed the
details of the landscape between the Surrey border and the Downs. There
is, in the present day, no more peculiarly Sussex view than the sight of
the bare line of the Downs caught in a framework of firs. For instance,
such a fine sight as you get of them at Heyshott from the height that
was once Cobden’s land, or the wonderful bit close by between Selham and
Burton. It is from a hill isolated and covered with this kind of timber
near Hardham that the best view of the Arun valley may be obtained, and
so forth all along the line from which at various points one may regard
the range of the Downs.
A third and characteristic aspect of Sussex is, of course, that great
stretch of the coastal plain to which so much allusion has been made
that we need not emphasise it here: the sole impression of the county
which those retain who have known it from a residence at Goring, at
Lancing, at Findon, at
[Illustration: RYE, FROM CAMBER]
[Sidenote: MONOTONY OF THE COAST]
Arundel, at Slindon, at Eartham, or indeed at any of the villages built
upon the southern foot-hills of the Downs. It may be mentioned in
connection with this part of the county, that of all maritime districts
possessed of remarkable inland scenery Sussex is the least to be
remembered by those who have seen it from the sea. The Downs slope up so
gradually, the line of the coast is so flat, and the reek of the coastal
towns, though slight, so continuous, that the general impression a man
has who runs along even upon a clear day from Rye harbour, let us say,
to the Looe Stream inside the Owers, thus covering the whole stretch of
the county coast, is one of monotony. The Downs make no impression upon
the view to landwards, save at one place where, for ten miles or so from
Eastbourne to Newhaven, one runs along their seaward end and the high
cliffs of Beachy Head, Birling Gap, and Seaford.
For any one not fully acquainted with the county, and desirous of
thoroughly learning its character, the best plan is to take one of the
several routes which traverse it, and to make his journey slowly. The
county is so diversified, its changes of scenery are so rapid, and the
slight falls and rises of the Weald make each so considerable a
difference to the view, that quick travelling will never teach a man the
nature of Sussex. It is on this account that the millions who have gone
and come by the railway between London and the sea coast have not
retained so much as the knowledge that they have passed through the most
distinctive county in England. The same is undoubtedly true of the motor
car of to-day. What man travelling at fifteen to twenty miles an hour
recognises the moment when he crosses the county boundary, or picks out,
as he flashes by, the brickwork of a true Sussex gable?
There are but two ways of learning Sussex: on horseback and on foot; and
of these the first, for those who can afford it, is the best. As to the
line to be followed, those who have the leisure should certainly
traverse two--the one from north to south, the other from east to west.
And for the benefit of those who may be inclined to try the experiment,
there shall be detailed here the way in which such a journey may best be
undertaken.
It will be remembered that we have seen, with regard to the Weald, that
its original clearings with their isolated farmhouses were united by
random winding tracks--not true ways, such as
[Illustration: HARTFIELD]
[Sidenote: THE OLD FOREST TRACKS]
the old deep-cut British road under the Downs, still less properly
engineered or civilised roads, but mere forest paths rambling with but a
general direction, and linking up one steading with another.
Now it is a remarkable fact that the lines of these original tracks are
in great part preserved; in places they have been destroyed by the
plough, in others they have merged into the great highways of the
county, but much of them still remains in the form of secluded and
tortuous lanes which are sometimes partly metalled, sometimes flagged on
a packhorse path with Sussex marble, and sometimes left green. If a
traveller will take one of these where it enters the county and pursue
it to the Downs, he will get as true a conception of the way in which
the Weald has grown up, of its primeval woodland, and of the nature of
its clearings as it is possible to obtain. He will discover that to this
day very much of the curious loneliness of the Weald survives within a
mile or two of its most populous towns, and the impression of his two
days’ march (or one day if he is a great walker--the distance will
commonly be under twenty-five miles) will teach him more of the county
than any amount of bicycling along its main roads.
Perhaps the best example remaining of such an old track is that which
runs right for the Downs from the Surrey border where the road comes
from Dorking to Warnham. Its place-names here and there sufficiently
indicate the historic importance of the way. Thus its entry into the
county is the “shire mark”; its first farm “King’s Fold”--fold is a
characteristic ending of a Wealden name. Often before there were regular
farmhouses in a place there was a pen or boundary within which forest
cattle could be kept. Thus, Chiddingfold, Slinfold, Flitchfold,
Dunsfold, etc., in the forest on either side of the border.
Next on the road, an hour within the county, is Warnham, and in the
neighbouring hamlet of “Friday _Street_,” a termination which is
characteristic of village names along some ancient way; immediately
afterwards the road skirts Field Place, where Shelley the poet was born,
and becomes (a further characteristic of old tracks) a boundary--at
present a parliamentary boundary. It crosses the Arun at New Bridge or
Broad Bridge, and thence for many miles runs south, neglected and
silent, crossing the main ridge of the Weald and coming down upon the
“Greens,” Barn’s Green, where it throws off a little branch to the left,
which passes through Brook’s Green, Dragon’s Green, becomes
[Sidenote: AN OLD FOREST TRACK]
King’s Lane at Shipley, and thence goes on in a deserted green road
towards Chanctonbury.
Meanwhile from Barn’s Green the original track continues south and
somewhat west, becomes again a parliamentary boundary in the
neighbourhood of Coneyhurst Common, turns there once more into a
highroad, crosses the marshy upwaters of the Adur by a bridge which
recalls its twin to the north (Broad Ford Bridge), and makes straight
for the village of West Chiltington, one of those characteristic
villages which depend for their site upon the sandhills which rise so
suddenly from the clay beneath the Downs.
After this village it suddenly ceases to be a road, but continues in the
same line as a right of way to Roundabout (delightful name!), and thence
onward as a lane again to Storrington, which settlement was probably the
original goal of this very ancient forest road.
If any one will take such a walk in good weather he will thoroughly
understand what the history of the central part of Sussex has been.
Every name he finds and every building will enlighten him.
For an east and west line of travel two may be chosen, and both should
be undertaken if this highly differentiated countryside is to be fully
appreciated. The first needs but little description, it is a highroad
all the way, and holds the whole line of market towns spread out upon it
like beads upon a string; but it is characteristic of the Weald that
even this is not a road single in its intention, but is composed of
various old paths which have been patched together.
In taking this walk you will go from Petersfield to Midhurst, where are
two inns, The Angel and The Eagle; then from Midhurst through Cowdray
Park you follow the Petworth road, and at Petworth is an inn called The
Swan, remarkable for excellent mild ale. Then from Petworth you will go
through Fittleworth and Stopham, over Stopham Bridge to Pulborough; and
at this point the old marshes of the Arun, the line of heights from
Broomer’s Hill to Thakeham, and the marshes of the Adur beyond these
cause the road to double. Cowfold is your object, some ten miles away in
a straight line. You must either strike up through Billingshurst five
miles north, and then take the straight road from Billingshurst to
Cowfold, or else you must strike south to Storrington, and then take the
road through Washington, which branches to the left just after Wiston,
and so reaches Cowfold through Ashurst and Partridge Green. After
Cowfold
[Illustration: PULBOROUGH MARSH]
[Sidenote: WAY ALONG THE DOWNS]
it is a connected road again as it was up to Pulborough. You go eastward
through Cuckfield, through Hayward’s Heath, past the railway which you
cross close to Newick Station, straight on to Maresfield, down south to
Uckfield, then on by the main road to Heathfield. A mile eastward of the
railway there the road branches; but your better plan is to follow the
old line up which came the army of Jack Cade--that is, to skirt
Heathfield Park, to pass through Chapel Cross, go over Brightling Hill
which has wonderful command of the whole district, and so come down upon
the Rother at Robertsbridge. There you will find an inn called the
George, of considerable moment. East of this you are no longer in the
spirit of Sussex, but in that of Kent, and a very few minutes farther on
you are over the legal boundary between the two counties.
The second line is, of course, that of the Downs. It has the
disadvantage of ending abruptly at the sea, and does not show you the
whole length of the county as does the line through the Weald. But it
has the advantage that no other walk or ride anywhere is of the same
kind: fifty miles of turf, broken only by four short gaps in the river
valleys, lie before you between Harting Hill and Beachy Head. The
itinerary of such a ride is as follows:--
You will leave Petersfield by the eastern road, and turn by that lane on
the right which makes for the Downs, reaching their summit upon Harting
Hill. There is no proper track, but it is open going round the northern
edge of Beacon Hill and so onwards, always keeping to the escarpment,
and passing to the southern side of the summit of Linch Down. This
latter course has the advantage that it avoids going round deep combe or
crypt, and, moreover, on the southern side of the summit you strike that
ridgeway which will accompany you for many miles, and which here leads
you between the two woods in the open. About a mile to the east of the
summit of Linch Down you have to cross the somewhat low and steep pass
where the Midhurst and Chichester road crosses the hills. Your ridgeway
takes you straight across it over the top of Cocking Tunnel, and on up
again to the Down on the eastern side of the gap. There it is a clear
ride right away until you come above Lavington. At this point it is well
to strike to the right or south-west, making for a little chapel which
you will see below you in a sort of interior valley of the Downs. Here
you will find a highroad
[Sidenote: WAY ALONG THE DOWNS]
which is the highroad to Petworth; and if you continue it to a group of
cottages known as The Kennels, you may leave it again due eastward over
some ploughed land until you find in less than half a mile the
escarpment of the hills again.
The object of this somewhat complicated direction is to avoid the sharp
angle of the Downs at Duncton Hill, but if any one thinks the short cut
too difficult, he has but to follow round the escarpment, and he will
come by a rather longer route to the same point, which is that steep
combe above Sutton and Cold Harbour which those who live to the south of
it call, from the nearest farm, “Gumber Corner,” but which is also known
as Cold Harbour Hill. It is well to pause here and make it, as it were,
a centre of observation, for it is a spot from which the general
character of the county, the divisions into which it naturally falls,
and the special features which make up its landscape, may all be seized
in one view.
There is, perhaps, no other place in England where the landscape is so
full of history, and at the same time so diverse and so characteristic
of its own country-side.
To the south of you, some 600 feet below, is the whole stretch of the
sea-plain, and beyond it, up to the horizon, which is lifted right into
the sky, is the belt of the sea. On this, if it be near evening, you see
the regular flashing of the Owers Light, which marks that group of rocks
where once was a Roman town, and you note how the sea is eating up all
that shore. Stretching out towards the light in a sharp point is the
promontory of Selsea Bill--all that is left of the submerged land. Here
was founded the first bishopric of Sussex. And as your mind dwells upon
that foundation you catch, a little to the west and to the right, the
great spire of Chichester Cathedral standing up eight miles away under
the sunset--Chichester, to which was removed, and which is now the
successor of, St. Wilfrid’s original See.
The boundary here between the Sussex sea-plain and Hampshire is clearly
marked, for the level light sends a gleam along the creeks of the upper
harbours beyond Bosham, which undoubtedly were the first principal
divisions along this coast between the South Saxons and their neighbours
to the west.
As you look along that horizon eastward, you continue to see a chain of
Sussex things. You see the port of Littlehampton, one of the Sussex
river mouths; farther off, on the extreme limit of your view, you see
the lights of Worthing,
[Illustration: KING RICHARD’S WALK, CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL]
[Sidenote: VIEW FROM GUMBER]
characteristic of the new great watering-towns which have grown up all
along this coast. You have in one landscape all that maritime fringe of
Sussex which is held in such detestation by the men of the Weald, and
which is yet the side from which civilisation or change has always come
into the county: the sea-plain upon which the Saxon pirates landed; the
plain upon which the siege of the Roman town of Anderida took place. It
was from this sea that Christianity came, and it was on the same flat,
though in the eastern part of it, that William of Falaise landed with
his army on the way to conquer at Hastings.
Between the high place from which you are thus looking southward and
surveying the land toward the sea--between the main range of the Downs,
that is, and the dead flat of the rich plough-land--you see, in one low
summit after the other, those foot-hills of the Downs which are an
essential part of the Sussex landscape, and which are so full of Sussex
history. Here stand in a row, partly isolated from each other,
Halnecker, with its gaunt deserted mill; Eartham, where Cowper for some
little time wrote, and where perhaps the best portrait of him was
painted. Next is the great wooded mass of the Nore Hill, now
uninhabited and silent, but once a stronghold; the neighbouring summit
of Slindon, which was Canterbury land, one of the great houses of the
Archbishop; the promontory of the Rewell Wood, which hides Arundel; and
farther off eastward that semi-conical lift of Cissbury, which the men
of the place call High Down. Here first the Briton, then the Roman, then
the Saxon held their trenches, and here has been found that most
fascinating and absorbing relic of prehistory--a manufactory of flint
implements, finished and half-finished, with the cores and the chips
lying beside the completed work.
This is what you see to the southward. Directly to the east and the west
of you is the wall of the Downs, on the crest of which you stand.
Nowhere else on the crest of that wall will you see them look so long or
so sheer. You see them fall mile after mile on to the plain, some
jutting slightly forward, as does Ditchling Beacon, upon the limit of
one’s gaze, and the whole forming one strict escarpment, the like of
which is not to be discovered to our knowledge elsewhere in the world.
From this point you perceive and are filled with the utter loneliness of
these hills; there is not a house on them nor a man, and they are the
more
[Sidenote: VIEW FROM GUMBER]
lonely that you have so immediately, and yet so far, below you the
little farmhouses in their combes.
These combes, their names and their great hollows, recall to you the
enormous antiquity upon which Sussex reposes. Their name is a Celtic
name. It has outlasted the three great foreign invasions of the
land--the Roman civilisers, the German pirate, and the re-entry of the
Latins with the Norman Conquest. Their woods also have outlasted every
destroyer, every cultivator, and engineer. No one can plough these steep
hollows--the beeches have clung to them from the beginning and will
cling to them always. Immediately beneath you is one such horseshoe,
bitten into the mass of the Down; and if you stand still you can hear
moving in it the life of beasts which men have never seriously
disturbed. Small as these woods are, they are as primal and as isolated
as anything you will find in any distant valley. They are not cut for
profit, or at least very rarely, because the ground is too steep for
haulage. They live their own life and are secluded.
Indeed, all over the broad back of the Downs, for seventy miles and
more, these patches of woods, both in the combes and up on the shoulders
of the hills, are a necessary part of Sussex. They exhibit the
unconquerable nature of the county, its strongholds of silence and of
desertion within an hour or two of London, and within a short walk of
those flaring new places which have sprung up upon the sea-shore. The
past and the very meaning of the county can still be remembered in the
names of those woods. Here are certain of the “forests” remaining. Right
at your feet is Houghton Forest, the remnant of a great royal wood lost
to the Crown perhaps in the civil wars.
This view along the Downs tells you many other things about the county:
you have, for instance, close beside you, not three miles away, perhaps
the earliest and until latterly one of the most used of the “Passes”
over the Downs--the cross-roads at Whiteways. The London road and the
road which had followed along under the Downs from Lewes unite at the
summit of the Saddle, and lead travellers from the capital or from the
Weald to Arundel or to the sea-plain. It is an example of those passages
over the hills which have been mentioned as running from Cocking near
Midhurst right away to Lewes, and which have their best roads at
Duncton, here at Whiteways, at Washington, and beyond New Timber at
Clayton.
[Illustration: OLD WHITING MILL, MIDHURST]
[Sidenote: VIEW FROM GUMBER]
Those river valleys which we have seen to be so peculiar to the
modelling of the South country--trenches cut right through the chalk and
appearing to ignore the natural watershed which the hills would
form--come also into this landscape. The greatest of them is right
before you in the Arun valley. If it is winter you will see in the
sheets of water surrounding the river why these valleys were not used
for communication, and why to this day, though the railway has built
itself an embankment across the marshes, no road runs through along the
level floor, which would seem at first sight the obvious gate through
the Downs from the Weald to the sea.
You can also see from this point of vantage one of those castles which
guard the gates of the county, for you can see to the north of the gap
the ruins of Amberley. In a word, you have the whole nature of the Downs
and of the sea-plain before you as you look from Gumber.
But you have also much more. Turn to the northward, and there lies
before you the whole stretch of the Weald: its towns, its little sandy
pine-clad heights, its irregular plan, the large remains of its old
woods and heaths. Far beyond it you may see, like another wall answering
the southern wall of the Downs, the line of the Surrey hills; and all
Sussex which is not maritime lies between you and them in one sweep.
You have to the north-westward the great bunch of Hindhead, where the
three counties of Hampshire, Sussex, and Surrey meet; you have to the
eastward an interminable succession of low heights, one behind the
other, which stretch out to the Kentish border and make up the Sussex
Weald. You may see, at the farthest point which the eye can reach, the
lonely fir-trees upon Ashdown, which stands so high as to hide the
Kentish “hursts” behind it.
One of those small towns of the Weald which are most characteristic of
Sussex is beneath you, the little town of Petworth, with its great house
insolently overshadowing it and swallowing it up. There is also beneath
you something more Sussex and more dignified than the blatant grandeur
of such a palace--the squires’ houses all the way along from Burton to
Parham. You are too far to see how well they illustrate the
county,--Parham especially, which is built of chalk, and is altogether a
sort of natural growth of Sussex,--but you may easily grasp in their
continuous line what sort of house it was round which the old manors
clung.
[Illustration: MILL POOL, MIDHURST]
[Sidenote: VIEW FROM GUMBER]
From Gumber also you judge how far it may be true that the Weald was
ever uninhabited. You see indeed great patches of woodland, and many
more patches of what may have been recent, but what are most likely
ancient, clearings. You see belts of heath on which nothing has ever
grown or will grow, and you see everywhere villages which are certainly
of great age, because they lie along the main lines of communication.
Speaking of these, it is worthy of notice that you have next to you, as
you stand here on Gumber, that most distinct and the best-preserved
Roman road in England. The Stane Street crosses this saddle of the
range; it is raised several feet above the surface of the hills. It is
like a rampart, and comes straight from the spire of Chichester on the
south-western horizon. Here are visible all the points of the Stane
Street which have been detailed upon a former page, the way in which it
negotiates the escarpment of the Downs in a great curve, and the way in
which, when once it has struck the plain, it darts right for the
crossing of the Arun at Pulborough. Hence also may be caught that gap in
the Surrey hills at Dorking for which the road makes northward, and
beyond which it is lost in the turf at Epsom.
As you trace that taut line across the Weald you may note every period
of the Sussex past. You see it crossing at Bignor the winding elbowed
British lane which has sunk so deep through centuries of traffic below
the surrounding fields, you see the famous ruins of the Roman villa, and
the ruin of the Priory of Hardham, which stood upon its highway.
The watershed which divides the Sussex from the Surrey rivers stands up
in the midst of the Weald before you plainly enough, though it is lower
than the ridge of the Downs to the north or the south. There is to be
distinguished very clearly to the north-east that part of it called St.
Leonard’s Forest from which flows the Arun to the south and the Mole to
the north: the Sussex river of Arundel, and the Surrey river of Dorking.
All those things, then, which are especial to the county, and which we
have remarked elsewhere to be the distinguishing marks of Sussex, stand
out in this view from Gumber: the historic sites, the forests, the
escarpment of the Downs, their foot-hills; the encroachments of the sea;
the ancient and the modern parts which the sea-line plays in Sussex
history; the small old ports which have so much, and the great modern
pleasure towns which
[Sidenote: WESTBURTON HILL]
have so little, to do with the life of Sussex men; the river crossing
the chalk hills; the oaks, the pines, and the heaths of the Weald; the
Roman foundations of our state; the great Roman road and the Roman
villa; the squires’ houses, its successors; the little towns; the
marshes of the gaps through the hills; the roads over the passes,--all
these are combined in such a view, and if a man has but very little time
in which to comprehend the nature of Sussex he cannot do better than to
leave the Chichester road for awhile, either at the top of Duncton hill,
or half a mile farther at The Kennels, and walk up to Gumber corner to
see the sight which has been here described.
Next after the Saddle, from which is seen this great view, the traveller
will go on eastward along the ridge, down the somewhat steep side of
Bignor Hill, and he will find on the other side of the cleft, which here
separates Bignor from Westburton Hill, the first of those dew pans of
which we spoke in our first description of the county. From just beside
it there is a straight green track leading just south of the crest of
the hills, and just north of the line of Houghton Forest, and falling at
last into the highroad from London to Arundel, just before the
cross-road of Whiteways, where is the lodge of Arundel Park. Here he
has the choice of two routes: he may go through Arundel Park down on to
the town of Arundel some two or three miles away, or he may go straight
down Houghton Hill and so across the bridge at Amberley. It is this
latter course which he had better take if his object is an exploration
of the Downs.
Going down Houghton Hill he will note the old road running steeply down
the side of the Downs and the new one curving more gently to the south.
They reunite at the entrance of Houghton village, just where the old
inn, the George and Dragon, stands. A hundred yards farther there comes
in that ancient track which links up all the prehistoric village sites
under the Downs, and for which there is no name.
It is interesting, as one leaves Houghton village, to notice how the
road (which is now identical with the old British track) approaches the
marshy land of the river, following the spur of dry land which pushes
out into the marshes, and making for the nearest similar spur on the
farther side of the stream. All old British ways approach a river in
this fashion, as, for instance, the track to which we owe London Bridge,
the crossing of the Medway near Lower Halling, of the Mole just north
of
[Sidenote: RACKHAM HILL]
Dorking, and of the Darent at Oxford. The last few yards of the road
where the marshy land begins are carried on the modern causeway; the
Arun itself is crossed by a fine bridge, on the farther side of which is
an inn which makes a very good stopping-place, whether a man has ridden
or has walked, for, by the time he reaches this inn, he will have gone
between fifteen and twenty miles. Moreover, it is always wise, when one
is exploring the Downs, to rest in the river valleys which cut them
rather than to come down off their main summits on to the plain, for to
do this last is to waste much effort in the climb of next morning.
Half a mile after leaving Houghton Bridge inn the traveller will find a
lane leading straight up to the top of the Downs, a summit here called
Rackham Hill; and thenceforward he has before him a ridgeway of five
miles of unbroken turf of the finest sort in England, midway along which
he should note upon the steep escarpment beneath him (along the northern
side of what is called Kithurst Hill) the great embankment which may
perhaps be defensive earthworks, or may perhaps be some religious emblem
of the prehistoric ancestors of the county.
At the end of the five miles he comes down upon what is known as
Washington Gap, where the Worthing road crosses the hills, and as he
does so he leaves upon his right Highden, the original home of the
Gorings, and the centre from which has spread the influence of that
Sussex family. The gap is low, but a little over 300 feet, and when he
has crossed it he must go up nearly 500 more to the height of
Chanctonbury Ring, which is the knot or pivot, as it were, upon which
the whole system of the range turns. Though it is not exactly central
between the Hampshire borders and the sea end of the Downs, being a good
deal to the west of such a centre, it is a place of observation from
which the range may be discovered stretching to the left and right
through the whole of its extent. Ditchling Beacon to the east and
Duncton Down to the west are twenty or thirty feet higher, but neither
is so conspicuous as the Ring. Here also, immediately to the east and
just below the clump of trees, is the largest dew pan on the Downs.
It is possible to go down from Chanctonbury straight to Steyning, but,
if one desires to see all one can of the hills, it is better to keep
upon them until one sees below one a spur pointing towards Bramber;
there is a lane down this spur, and at
[Sidenote: THE DEVIL’S DYKE]
Bramber another excellent inn called the Castle Inn. Here the second
river valley of the Downs is crossed: the valley of the Adur. From the
Arun to the Adur is a very short day, yet it is good policy to rest
here, as there is no other break in the hills between this valley and
that of the Ouse at Lewes, which is almost as long a journey as that of
the first day.
After Bramber the line of the range becomes somewhat confused, and does
not follow that strict and unbending direction which has hitherto marked
it. There is a projection northward in Wolstonbury Hill, and fairly deep
depressions between the principal heights. The course to be followed is
further complicated by the near presence of Brighton, which has thrown
out a railway almost up to the top of the range, and has brought the
influences of a town to the deep combe known as Devil’s Dyke.
This unfortunate spot cannot be avoided save on foot, for, on horseback,
the escarpment to the north is too steep to be followed; it is therefore
best to take it boldly, unpleasant as it is, to go well south of the
Dyke and make for the hamlet of Saddlescombe, the first passage of the
Downs after Bramber. Thence the traveller will go due north-east over
the shoulder of New Timber Hill, in the valley beyond he will cross the
two Brighton roads (that from Crawley and that from Cuckfield) just
before they join, he will leave Wolstonbury Hill wholly on his left and
will make for the summits of the Downs before him, going due eastward
from the highroad when he has crossed it.
When he has once reached these summits beyond the road he has another
straight run of seven miles of splendid turf and of glorious views along
a lonely and unwooded ridge, past Ditchling Beacon, and catching beneath
him as he goes, at the foot of the hills, the last miles of the old
British track which here links up Westmeston, Plumpton, and Offham.
When he comes at last to the fall of the hills down upon the Ouse
valley, he will see before him the town of Lewes and its castle, and as
he goes down towards it he will note the race-course upon his right,
which stands upon the site of the great battle of 1264, wherein the
Barons defeated the King and laid the foundations of Parliament. Lewes,
when he reaches it, should form his third resting-place, lying as it
does upon the third of the rivers which cut the Downs.
Upon the fourth day the way lies along the main Eastbourne road for the
first two or three
[Illustration: BEACHY HEAD]
[Sidenote: BEACHY HEAD]
miles, until Beddingham is reached. There one turns to the right just by
the church, and after half a mile of going one finds a lane leading
straight up on to the Downs; a ridgeway takes one along the crest (the
height of which is here called Firle Beacon), and in about five miles
one comes down upon the valley of the Cuckmere and the very old village
of Alfriston.
For the last few miles of the journey there is a choice of ways: one may
turn to the right after Alfriston bridge and, going past Lullington
Court, take a lane which leads one straight to the village of Jevington,
thus cutting off the projecting corner and height of Winddower Hill, or
one may turn to the left after the bridge and go round over the top of
the ridge, and so down on to Jevington from the north. From Jevington a
short lane leads straight up on to the height of Willingdon Hill, and
thence it is a straight southerly line along the escarpment with a few
slight rises and falls until, just four miles on, one stands above the
precipice of Beachy Head where the Downs fall into the sea, and one’s
journey is ended. These four days, if they are spent in weather of
passible clearness, teach one the whole of that lonely and wonderful
belt of England, the landscape and character of which have built up the
county on either side to the north and south of hills.
It would, of course, be possible to devise many another journey by which
those who do not know the county might better appreciate somewhat of its
aspects. But these three of which we have spoken are the best in general
for an exploration of Sussex, unless one pleases to add a fourth of a
somewhat monotonous and truncated character, which would be to cover in
one day the coastal plain from Chichester to Brighton, and in another
the sea coast and the marshes from Eastbourne to Rye. The second section
of this is straightforward enough, taking one through Pevensey,
Hastings, and Winchelsea. As to the first, it is advisable not to follow
the main road through Arundel, but to go by lanes nearer the sea from
Chichester to Eastergate, thence to Yapton, and so on through
Littlehampton, West Ferring, Worthing, and along the sea coast to New
Shoreham. It is possible also to take either section right along its
beach. There is no interruption, but it would be a dreary and a
heart-breaking thing to do, and would leave upon a man a general
impression of red brick and boarding-houses, and esplanades and tin
bungalows, interrupted by intervals of tufted grass growing
[Illustration: WILLINGDON]
[Sidenote: THE SUSSEX SEA]
rank upon deserted sand-hills. Nay, even these are not all deserted, for
in places Londoners can be seen upon them playing golf.
It is best to wander inland, to pass every night at some one of the
small market towns, and, when one has returned from the county, to be
able to remember the many unbroken woods, the isolated clearings, the
primeval tracks, now metalled and now green, the little patches of
swamp, the clay pools and the short oaks of the Weald, the abrupt
sandstone ledges crowded with pine, the bare Downs beyond seen between
such trees, and the large levels of the four rivers which, between them,
make up the county, and explain the history of its soil and of its
families, and the peculiar tenacity with which it maintains under all
modern vicissitudes its unique and enduring character.
It may not be without utility to close these pages with a few remarks
upon the last way in which the county can be explored in the course of a
holiday. We will consider the approach from the sea and learn something
of the way in which a small boat should regard the harbours of this
coast; of how the rivers are to be ascended, and of the particular
difficulties at the mouth of each.
Those of our readers who have the opportunity to explore the county in
this way from the coast and the Channel may not be numerous, but they
can at least boast that their method of travel can give them the best
appreciation of its history, for Sussex grew up from the harbours.
We have already remarked that the Sussex harbours come at fairly regular
intervals, especially those between Beachy Head and the Isle of Wight,
but they are not by any means equally easy of access, even for a small
boat drawing, let us say, six feet of water; and the most difficult of
all five is Rye, at the mouth of the Rother.
It is an almost universal rule that old harbours from which the sea has
retreated, but to which the waterway still exists, are difficult of
access, and Rye is no exception to this rule. There extends for more
than a mile from the shore a mass of peaty mud through which the sea-bed
of the river winds in a most tortuous fashion; at half-tide it is almost
impossible to follow it if one has had no local experience. The matter
is made worse from the fact that the channel is very poorly marked; its
first entrance from the sea is impossible to discover in thick weather
and not too easy upon a clear day. All this is a pity, for if Rye were
still as accessible
[Illustration: BOAT-BUILDING AT RYE]
[Sidenote: HASTINGS BAY]
as is say Arundel, or even Bosham, it would form the most charming of
all entries into the county, with its pyramid of old red roofs and its
deep and visible history.
From Rye all the way across the bay to Beachy Head there is no haven,
nor for the matter of that any difficulty for a small craft, save that
the shore is very flat between Hastings and Eastbourne, and that, as
one’s course takes one well out, it is not easy to fix landmarks. In
good weather, of course, Beachy Head is a most prominent object all the
way, and the light below it a perfect mark at night, but a very little
haze is enough to make a yachtsman who is following alongshore get a
mile or two in or out, especially as a strong tideway runs in between
Pevensey Bay and the Royal Sovereign shoals. Rounding Beachy Head itself
is easy enough work except when a strong northerly wind is blowing. On
these occasions the Head, which is very abrupt, and the cliffs to the
west of it, have a way of spilling sharp gusts unexpectedly down on to
the water beneath. The present writer has seen a five-tonner under three
reefs and a storm jib all but swamped within half a mile of the shore by
one of these puffs, which are especially dangerous from the fact that
there is no telling quite in what direction they will come. A full
north-easterly wind on the starboard quarter as one rounds the head can
give one a set-back in the shape of an unexpected gust coming round from
right ahead out of Birling Gap. The only rule when the wind is blowing
strong off-shore is to keep well out--irritating as it is to have to do
so when one is making Newhaven, since every tack towards the outside
means another mile to be beaten inwards against the weather.
Some years ago it would have been necessary to warn the reader of a
small reef which runs out from Beachy Head and is especially dangerous
at high water, but a new lighthouse is now fixed upon this reef and the
old danger no longer exists.
Newhaven Harbour, as we have seen upon a previous page, is the most
serious commercial harbour upon the coast. It is the only one before
which there is not some considerable bar, and it goes without saying
that small boats, such as we are supposing, can enter freely at any
state of the tide; but it is by no means the easiest of the Sussex
rivers for a small boat to _lie_ in. It has a heavy traffic both of
trade and passengers, conveyed in large steamers along a rather narrow
river, and until a dock for large craft has been constructed it
[Illustration: OLD SHOREHAM BRIDGE]
[Sidenote: SHOREHAM HARBOUR]
will always be a rather anxious place to get in and out of, especially
as there is a very strong tide in the Ouse. A dozen miles or so farther
westward along the coast is the modern entrance of Shoreham Harbour.
This harbour has a rather awkward bar, and it is not infrequently
necessary to wait for the tide; moreover the tideway runs like a stream
right athwart the mouth, and therefore tends to make one run dangerously
near the pier-heads if the wind is light, but, once this bar is crossed
and the piers past, Shoreham still affords very good moorings for a
small boat, and it also is well situated for proceeding in any direction
inland; but one must be careful to take the right-hand or eastern branch
of the harbour, and not to go up the river on the left-hand side, as the
former is deep, secure, and well-wharfed, while the latter has steep,
shingly banks, and soon becomes extremely shallow.
At much the same distance from Shoreham that Shoreham is from Newhaven
will be found the harbour of Littlehampton, which is in some ways the
best of all as a centre or goal for small craft. Its great drawback is
its bar, which is the worst in the whole county, worse even than that of
the Rother. In spite of continual dredging this bar is perpetually
appearing above the surface at low spring tides, and it is hopeless to
attempt to enter at any draught of water before half-tide. The bar is,
however, quite close to the end of the pier; there is good holding
ground for anchor, and signals of showing from the pier-head
signal-staff clearly indicate the depth over the bar at any moment. The
heavy gales from the south-west, which are the only dangerous ones on
those parts of the coast (with the exception of some very rare
south-easterly gales), are broken for Littlehampton by the Owers Bank,
and to some extent by the group of rocks which run eastward from them,
and there are very few days when it is not safe to anchor outside and
wait for the tide.
Once inside, the Arun will be found the most practicable and the most
delightful of Sussex rivers for the sailor. There is depth for seagoing
vessels all the way up to Arundel, the approach to which is perhaps the
most striking approach to a port to be found in England. Half-way on
this journey is a rolling railway bridge, but there is no other
obstruction and plenty of water all the way. At Arundel is the first
permanent bridge, but a small boat, or a boat with a lowering mast, can
go on much farther up the river. The tide will carry one, when there
is
[Illustration: THE ARUN, NEAR PULBOROUGH]
[Sidenote: THE ARUN]
no backwater or flood, as high as Pulborough in the heart of the county.
Formerly all the Sussex rivers gave this opportunity for entering from
the sea into the centre of the countryside, to which was doubtless due
the only too thorough results of the pirate raids in the early part of
our history. Thus a Danish ship has been found right up the Rother on
the Kentish border near Northiam, at a place where the river is now no
more than a brook. Similarly it was easy to sail up the Ouse far beyond
Lewes. As we have previously remarked, the Adur was a navigable river
till recent times almost as far as Shipley. At present the Arun alone of
these waterways remains. It owes its preservation to the fact that the
care of man has never been allowed to lapse upon its banks. Its high
dykes (still called by the Norman-French name of “rives”) have always
been carefully maintained, and where the old river was silting up (as
for instance in the great bend by Burpham) new cuts have preserved the
scouring of the channel. We must, however, regret that in this direction
the canal system by which the Arun was linked up with the rest of
England has been deliberately allowed to go to pieces. There used to be
a waterway from Ford to Chichester, which made the most delightful of
inland excursions, and of which Turner has painted a famous picture. It
is now nothing but a dry ditch. Higher up near Hardham another waterway
led across the great bend of the river to Stopham and continued, as a
canal parallel to the stream, across the Weald until the upper waters of
the Wey were reached, and through them the Thames valley. It was
therefore quite easy until the destruction of the canal to go by water
from the Sussex coast to Weybridge. It is typical of our modern politics
that a national advantage of this sort should have been thrown away by
Parliament in its subservience to the railway interest, and it is to be
hoped that that advantage will soon be regained. The trench is still
there and the emplacement of the old locks, and the sum required to put
the canal into use again would certainly be recovered in a few years of
pleasure traffic alone.
The last of the harbours we have to consider is that ramification of
creeks on the extreme west of the county known collectively as
“Chichester Harbour.” Here also there is a very bad bar and a
complicated entrance. From Littlehampton a small boat should make for
the point of Selsea Bill and so creep through Looe stream. But she
[Illustration: BOSHAM]
[Sidenote: CHICHESTER HARBOUR]
must take care to do this on an ebb-tide, for it is impossible to get
through against the flood.
Even for quite small vessels the entry of Chichester Harbour is
navigable only at high tide, but the exploration of it is delightful,
whether one runs up Fishbourne Creek (which lands one near to
Chichester) or, leaving this on the right, one goes straight on to the
wharf of Bosham. There is, unfortunately, no river running from these
creeks up into the county, but they form an excellent and sheltered
mooring from which to start upon sails into the Solent just to hand.
This method of learning the county, the entry from the sea, is the most
natural, the most historic, and the most germane to the nature of
Sussex. Every port one enters is the port of Rape, every river up which
one’s dinghy takes one is the river along which the penetration of the
county has proceeded in past times, and one upon which its principal
market-towns will be found. So Chichester, Arundel, Steyning, Lewes, can
be reached, and with more difficulty towns farther up the country. The
whole manner in which Sussex has grown up is impressed upon the man who
enters it from the Channel.
Unfortunately it is the least familiar and perhaps least easy of all
the ways in which the county may be approached, but those who care to
try the experiment will find themselves well repaid for the exertion the
method involves, especially as they explore one of those valleys which
lead through the Downs and reveal section by section, as one goes up
stream, every distinctive portion and contrast of the countryside, until
the heart of the Weald is reached, and the traveller can see from his
boat, as the pirate of the fifth century saw from a wider and more
marshy stream, the long, straight escarpment of the hills closing the
horizon and defining the land to which he was to give his language and
his tribal name.
INDEX
Adur, River, 39, 40
Aella, legend of, 60
Alfordean Bridge, on Stane Street, 58
Amberley, antiquity of, 111
goes back to eighth century, 105
on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
position on Arun, 36, 37
Amberley Castle, 110
Anderida, legend of fall of, 60-61
upon site of Pevensey, 53
Angerming, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Arun, maritime portion of, 38
Arun River, 35, 36
its advantages for sailing and boating, 186-188
Arundel, absence of Roman relics in, 53
early fortification of, 66
original site of bridge of, 109
Rape of. _See_ Rape of Arundel river valley of, 37
town of, probable great antiquity of, 107-109
Arundel Castle, new cut-flint work in, 32
view from river, 37, 38
Ashburnham, family of, 126
Ashington, family of, 14
Bar, absence of, at mouth of Ouse, 41
Bar, at mouth of Adur, 39
Barlavington, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Barnham, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Bartelotts of Stopham, 127
Battle, Monastery of, 119
position of, 44
Battle of Hastings, 71-74
Beach, value of to early navigators, 4
Beachy Head, 179
difficulties of sailing under, 183, 184
Beeding, mentioned in Alfred’s will, 101
“Belts” for principal longitudinal divisions of Sussex, 10, 11
Bexhill, mentioned in Doomsday, 92
Bignor, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
example of sand formation in the Weald, 14
on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
Roman pavement of, on Stane Street, 55
Billingshurst, 113
on Stane Street, 58
Binsted, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Bishopric, first Sussex, founded, 64
Blunt, family of, 127, 133, 134 191
Bosham, mentioned in Doomsday, 116
Boundaries of Sussex, east and west, 5
Boundary, northern, of Sussex, nature of, 8
Boxgrove, Monastery of, arises on the Roman Road, 118
on Stane Street, 55
Bramber, a parliamentary borough, 101
Bramber Castle, 99-100
continuity of possession of, 100
example of flint building, 31
early fortification of, 66
on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
Braose, first overlord of Rape of Bramber, 99
Brighton, importance of in Rape of Lewes, 83
modern development of, 137, 138
British Road under Downs, 15
Buckman’s Farm, on Stane Street, 58
Burford Bridge, on Stane Street, 54
Burpham, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
on Arun, 37
Burrell, first Member for Rape of Bramber, 103, 104
Burton, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
example of sand formation in the Weald, 14
Bury, on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
example of sand formation in the Weald, 14
mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Buttolphs, mentioned in Doomsday, 101
position on Adur, 39
Buxted, late development of, 91
Canals from Arun, disused, 187, 188
Castle Arundel, new cut-flint work in, 32
at Arundel, 37, 38
Bramber, example of flint building, 31
Castles, secondary, of Sussex, 98, 99
Chanctonbury Ring, 24, 176
Chichester Harbour, difficulty of entry for small craft, 188, 189
marsh bounding Sussex to west, 5
Chichester, principal town of coastal plain, 11
site of capital of the Regni, 48
Christian religion destroyed by invasions, 62, 63
Climping, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Coastal Plain, 11, 12
character of landscape of, 154, 155
track of journey along, 180
Coast, Sussex, cruising along, 181-190
Cobden’s Farm, upon belt of loam under the Downs, 14
Cocking, mentioned in Doomsday, 116
Cold Harbour on Stane Street, 55
Combe, parish of, position on Adur, 39
Coombes, mentioned in Doomsday, 101
Counties, English, their characteristics, 1, 2
Crowborough, disfigurement of, 147
Crowhurst, mentioned in Doomsday, 92
Cuckfield, date of origin of, 84
Manor of, history of, 128
Cuckmere River, 41
Dawtreys of Petworth, 126
De Albinis, successors to Montgomerys, 106
Devil’s Dyke, 177
Dew pans on Downs, 25
Doomsday, survey of Lewes Rape, 81-84
Dorking Churchyard, on Stane Street, 54
Downs, difficulty of building on, 21
earthworks on, 26, 27
roads across, fewness of, 34
system of dew pans, 25
uninhabited, 19
villages to south of, 29
villages under escarpment of, 28
woods of, 22, 23
South, backbone of Sussex, 2
contour of, 9
direction of axis of, 10
nature of, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
_see also_ South Downs
Duncton, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Eartham, Manor of, history of, 129
Earthworks on Downs, 26, 27
Eastbourne, 141
Eastergate, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Ecclesiastical power in Rape of Chichester, 115, 116
Edward the Confessor, importance of reign of, 68
Egdean, example of sand formation in the Weald, 14
English counties, their characteristics, 1, 2
Felpham, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Feudalism, strength of, in Sussex, 78
Firle Beacon, 179
Fittleworth, its position on Western Rother, 36
Fitz Alans, successors to the de Albinis, 106
Five Oaks Green, on Stane Street, 58
Flint, method of building with, 30, 31, 32
Forest Ridge, 8, 11, 12
Fortification, primitive, example of at Kithurst Hill, 175
Frant, 90
Fulcking, on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
Gainsford, family of, 126
Godwin, a Sussex man, 68
his estates in Sussex, 69
Goring, family of, 126
Goring, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Graffham, mentioned in Doomsday, 116
example of sand formation in the Weald, 14
Manor and history of, 129
Gumber Corner, view from, 163-173
Hailsham, mentioned in Doomsday, 91
Halnecker Hill, on Stane Street, 55
Harbours, nature of Sussex, 3
Hardham, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Monastery of, arises on the Roman Road, 118
Roman camp at, on Stane St., 56
Hasting, the pirate, his raid, 66, 93
Hastings, Battle of, 71-74
Castle of, 93-97
example of value of a beach, 4
importance of beach to early shipping, 93-95
name of, 93
origins of, 93-97
Rape of. _See_ Rape of Hastings
Hastings Bay, method of crossing, 183
“Hastings Plain,” site of Battle of Hastings, 71
Hayward’s Heath, 13
Henfield, mentioned in Doomsday, 101
Heyshott, example of sand formation in the Weald, 14
mentioned as Percy Land, 117
Highden, original home of the Gorings, 176
Horsham, pronunciation of name of, 150
rises in thirteenth century, 101, 102
Houghton, crossing of Arun at, 111, 112
Houghton Forest, 113
Howards, successors to Albinis, 106
successors to Mowbrays, 100, 101
Hurstpierpoint, survey of Rape of Lewes, 83
Invasion, Saxon, of Sussex, 60-64
Iron industry, importance of to Rape of Pevensey, 90
Iron industry of Weald, antiquity of, 59
Juniper Hall, on Stane Street, 54
Keymer, survey of Rape of Lewes, 83
Kithurst Hill, 175
Knepp Castle, 104
Lancing, mentioned in Doomsday, 101
Landscapes of Sussex, 150-155
Lavington, example of sand formation in the Weald, 14
on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
Lewes, early fortification of, 66
importance of in Saxon times, 67
Norman Castle in, 81
position of on Ouse, 41
Rape of (_see also_ Rape of Lewes), 79-85
site of Battle of, 178
town, characteristics of, 80
Linch Down, 162
Littlehampton, at mouth of Arun, 38
difficulty of entry, and outside anchorage described, 185, 186
Loam, belt of, villages upon, 14
Looe Stream, 65
Madehurst, Manor of, history of, 129
Marshes bounding Sussex to east and west, 5
destruction of Roman roads in, 6
Mayfield, first of Sussex line of ecclesiastical palaces, 90
Midhurst, its position on Western Rother, 36
late development of, 117
Monasteries of Sussex, 117-119
Montgomerys, first overlords of Rape of Arundel, 106
Morton, first overlord of Rape of Pevensey, 87
Mount Caburn, example of prehistoric fortification, 91
Mowbrays, successors to Braose, 100
Nature of Sussex Harbours, 3
Newhaven Harbour, advantages and disadvantages of, for small craft, 184
Newhaven, position at mouth of Ouse, 41
Newtimber, Manor of, history of, 131
Norman Conquest in Sussex, 69-74
Northchapel, 113
Northern boundary of Sussex, nature of, 8
Northstoke on Arun, 37
Ockley (in Surrey), on Stane Street, 54
Ouse, river, 40, 41
Owers Lightship, 65
Oxenbridge, family of, 126
Palmers of Angerming, 126
Parham, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Peasantry of Sussex, character of, 144, 148
Petworth, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Pevensey, ancient geographical position of, 89
Celtic derivation of the name, 87
decline of, 89, 90
Level, termination of the Wealdon flats on the sea, 11
Rape of, _see_ Rape of Pevensey
Roman remains in, 88
site of Anderida, 53
William the Conqueror lands there, 71
Pine trees, comparatively recent in Sussex, 153-154
Place names, Sussex, 61
of Sussex, pronunciation of, 149, 150
Plain, Coastal, _see_ Coastal
Poynings, on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
Prehistory of Sussex unknown, 47
Pulborough, its position on Arun, 36
mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Pulborough Bridge, point where Stane Street crossed the Arun, 57
Rackham Hill, 175
Rape of Arundel, 104-113
Arundel, Montgomerys first overlords of, 106
Bramber, 99-104
Rape of Bramber, Braose first overlord of, 99
Chichester, 113-117
Hastings, 91-99
Lewes, growth of, 79-85
its central character, 85
original harbour of, 82
Lewes, William of Warren first overlord of, 82
Pevensey, 87-91
Pevensey, importance of iron industry, 90
Pevensey, Morton first overlord of, 87
Pevensey, shape of, 86
Rapes, divisions of Sussex, 77
number and origin of, 78
Regni, Sussex tribe, 48
Ridge, forest, 8
Rings of woods on Downs, 24
Rivers of Sussex, 3, 35-44
give rise to earliest settlements, 4
River valley, nature of Sussex, 42
River valleys of Sussex, not used by main roads, 21, 22
Robertsbridge, 91
Monastery of, 118
position of, on Rother, 44
Roman basis of Sussex civilisation, 48-59
camp at Hardham, on Stane Street, 56
fortifications at Alfordean Bridge, 58
Road, Stane Street, crossing Arun, 36
Road, Stane Street, fully described, 54-58
Roads destroyed in marshes, 6
Roman’s Wood, on Stane Street, 58
Rother, river of, 43, 44
Valley of, marshes in, bound Sussex eastward, 5
Western, 35
Rotherfield, antiquity of, 90
Rottingdean, in Doomsday survey of Rape of Lewes, 83
modern disfigurement of, 139
Rusper, late mention of, 102
Rye, antiquity and original conditions of, 92
harbour of, difficulty of entry, 182
Saddlescombe, 177
Saint Wilfrid, story of, 64
Sand formations in the Weald, 13
Saxon invasions of Sussex, 60-64
See of Selsea, founded, 64
Senlac, discussion of the name, 72
Shelleys, family of, 127, 132, 133
Shipley, developed in twelfth century, 101
Shoreham Harbour, entry of for small craft, described, 185
Shoreham, Old, position on Adur, 39
rise and decline of, 102-103
Singleton, in Doomsday, 116
Manor of, history of, 130
Slinfold, 113
South Downs, backbone of Sussex, 3
contour of, 9
journey along crest of described, 161-180
Southstoke on Arun, 37
Squires, rise of the power of, and disintegration of feudal system, 119-125
St. Denis, monastery of, original lords of Rotherfield, 90
“St. George and the Dragon” Inn at Houghton, 112
St. Leonard’s Forest, originallv Braose Land, 102
Stane Street, appearance of Gumber Corner, 171, 172
Roman road, crossing Arun, 36
fully described, 54-58
Stenes, southern valleys of Downs, 23
Steyning, on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
Stopham, junction of Western Rother and Arun, 35
mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Storrington, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
Strickland, family of, 126
Sussex, bounded by the Weald, 2
character of peasant in, 144
created from the sea, 2
east, gradual disfigurement of, 146
epithet “Scilly” applied to, 117
exploration of east and west, 159-161
feudalism, strength of, 78
general plan of, 45, 46
grouped round the South Downs, 2
isolation in prehistoric times, 47
landscapes of, 150-155
natural boundaries of, east and west, 5
northern boundary of, nature of, 8
peasant, character of, 148
peculiar dialect of, somewhat exaggerated, 143
place names, 51
place names, pronunciation of, 149, 150
rivers, 3, 35-44
rivers of, determined the first settlements, 4
sharp division in east and west, 144
towns developed later according to distance from sea, 7
Sutton, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Thatch, excellence of in Sussex, 135
Theakham, 14
Tortington, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Monastery of, 119
Towns, Sussex, developed later according to distance from sea, 7
Tumuli above Duncton Hill, 27
on Downs, 27
Uckfield, late development of, 91
Upper Waltham, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Valleys, to south of Downs, called stenes, 23
Villages to south of Downs, 29
under escarpment of Downs, 29
Walberton, mentioned in Doomsday, 105
Warren, the family of overlords of Rape of Lewes, 79
Warren, William of, first overlord of Rape of Lewes, 82
Washington, on old British trackway under the Downs, 15
pass over Downs at, 176
Watering-places, growth of, 136-142
Weald and parishes, shape of, 8
bounding Sussex to the north, 2
forest track through, present itinerary of described, 156-159
general character of, 12, 13
its military function at Norman Conquest, 73-76
West Dean House, example of flint building, 32
West Hampnet, on Stane Street, 54
Wilfrid, Saint, story of, 64
Willingdon Hill, 179
Winchelsea, antiquity of and original conditions of, 92
Wolstonbury Hill, 177
Woods of the Downs, 22, 23
Worth, last stage of development of Rape of Lewes, 84
Yapton, 11
THE END
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