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PART I

PAGE

THE PHYSICAL NATURE OF THE COUNTY 1

PART II

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SUSSEX 47

THE INDIVIDUAL CHARACTER OF SUSSEX AND THE WAY TO SEE THE COUNTY 143

INDEX 191

FACING PAGE

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 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

at either base, but cut off from the Thames valley by a soil long uncultivated and more suited to forest than to habitation.

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 , 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

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.

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

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.

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 with the first of the Saxon invasions. Arundel with the reign of King Alfred; Hastings and 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

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 , 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

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.

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 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

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

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 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.

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 r?le the South Downs must have played in the early history of Britain; for they furnished, as did the other three great chalk ranges , 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

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 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.

Thus an open space of park-land beyond Madehurst invited the eye of a very wealthy man 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.

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