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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

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 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 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

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

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.

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 aesthetes 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 , 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 , 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

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 mediaeval 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.

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 ; while to this day 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 , 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 ; 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

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 , 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,

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 , 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

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 mediaeval England, parishes that have decayed until they are merely small chapels attached to lonely farms , 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 mediaeval 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 archaeology has fallen into. A statement has been made 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,

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

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 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

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.

PART II

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SUSSEX

The pre-history of Sussex is unknown. The county does not lie 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.

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