Читать книгу County and Town in England Together with some Annals of Churnside - Allen Grant - Страница 7

Of all the English counties Sussex is the most typical and the most natural perhaps. Its physical features mark it out at once as a distinct and separate whole; and its history shows it as always an independent kingdom or a well-demarcated shire, preserving the self-same essential boundaries throughout its entire existence. A great spur of chalk, forming the range of the South Downs, diverges from the main boss of Salisbury Plain near the western limits of the county, and runs through it like a backbone till it topples over at last into the sea at the sheer precipices of Beachy Head. Between the Downs and the coast a narrow line of lowland fringes the shore—a mere sloping belt between the foot of the main range and the sea, ending at Brighton—and this belt, small as it is, comprises the whole of the real historical Sussex: a long line or procession of seaport villages and open meadows or cornfields, jammed in between the ever-narrowing Downs and the ever-encroaching waters of the Channel. On their northern side, again, the Downs descend by a steep escarpment into the wide open valley of the Weald, familiar to most people in the broad view from the summit of the Devil’s Dyke. Between the North and South Downs, the chalk which once covered the valley has been worn away by denudation, and the interval is occupied by the soft, muddy, weald clay, and the harder beds of Hastings sand. This wide tract of two wealden formations extends along the whole northern edge of the county from the Downs to the boundaries of Kent and Surrey, and from Petersfield, in Hants, till it slides under the sea at Pevensey, Hastings, and the Romney Marshes. For many ages the whole of the Sussex Weald was untilled and uncleared—a great stretch of forest, known to the Romans as the Silva Anderida and to the early English as the Andredesweald. Its cold clay can support little more than trees, and even in our own day it is scantily cultivated. In earlier times, however, the belt of forest which grew above it was dense and trackless; and it formed a complete barrier to intercourse with all other parts of the country, sweeping round in a great crescent, as it did, from the marshy region about Chichester and Hayling, along the whole northern face of the South Downs, till it met the sea again at Rye and Winchelsea. It is this isolation of Sussex by the Weald and the marshes which makes its history so peculiar and yet so typical.

Even the neolithic inhabitants of Sussex, who have left us their polished flint implements at Cissbury Hill, near Worthing, must have formed, one would suppose, a single united tribe. Their boundaries must almost necessarily have been determined for them by the Downs and the Weald in the rear, and by the marshy tracts about Chichester and Romney at either end. At any rate, those were the limits of the Celtic Regni at the Roman conquest; and their villages must have been confined to the coastwise slope between Chichester and Brighton, and to the rich little valley of the Ouse about Lewes. So completely isolated was this strip of shore, south of the Weald, that the Romans allowed the native chief to rule over his ancestral dominions, and thus left Sussex pretty much to its original independence. When the English pirates began to attack Britain, Sussex was one of their earliest settlements. Its isolation made it easy to conquer, just as the isolation of East Anglia, cut off from the rest of England by the then impassable fens, made it, too, one of the first vanquished regions. The story of the conquest, told us in the myths of the English Chronicle, has yet a certain verisimilitude of its own which gains confidence in spite of critical doubts. Four Saxon chieftains landed from their keels at Keynor in the Bill of Selsea—just one of those peninsular spots (enclosed between Chichester and Pagham harbours) such as the sea-robbers always used for their first attacks—and thence they proceeded to storm and capture the Roman fortress of Regnum, on the site of Chichester. “Some of the Welsh they slew,” says the Chronicle, “and the rest they drave into the wood hight Andredeslea.” For seven years after their coming they kept to the western half of the county, probably to the immediate neighbourhood of their new capital, Chichester; but in the eighth year they again fought the Welsh, and took the coast-line, apparently, as far as Brighton and Lewes. Still the Roman fort of Anderida, or Pevensey, held out in the east, guarding the lowlands; till at last, fourteen years after the first landing, “Ælla and Cissa beset Anderida, and offslew all that were therein, nor was there after even one Briton left.” From that time forth, in all probability, the whole of Sussex became united under a single overlordship; and the overlords had their chief seat at Chichester.

So much the legend tells us: but the facts themselves, as enshrined in local nomenclature and in the blood of the people, tell us a great deal more. That the English invaders were Saxons, not Jutes or pure restricted English, is clear from the very name of Suth Seaxe, afterwards softened down into Suth Sexe and Sussex. Here, as elsewhere, too, the name is really the name of a people, not of a district. Suth Seaxe means “the South Saxons,” and Sussex is merely a corruption of that form. The name of the commonwealth is the name of the folk. That the Saxons settled pretty numerously in Sussex is quite clear from the large number of English clan-names preserved in the names of the modern towns or villages. The extreme eastern corner—practically an island, shut in by the sea, the Romney marshes, the Pevensey marshes, and the Weald—was settled by the Hastingas, whose chief seat is still known as Hastings. No doubt this was at first a separate little principality, only slowly absorbed by the lords of Chichester; and it remains to this day a separate rape. In the western slope, between the downs and the sea, English clan-names are very common. We get them at Worthing, Lancing, Patching, Angmering, Goring, Tarring, and Climping, in the simple form. The tuns of the Rustingas and the Fortingas survive in Rustington and Fortington: the hams of other clans in Beddingham, Etchingham, and Pallingham. Among the deans and hoes of the downs, we still find Rottingdean, Ovingdean, and Piddinghoe. In the Selsea district and around Chichester, the clans clustered thickly: we get their memorials at East and West Wittering, Oving, Donnington, Funtington, and many others. The fertile valley of the Ouse, whose capital at Lewes was always of great importance throughout the Middle Ages, formed another great centre for Teutonic colonisation. There we find Bletchington, Tarring, Beddingham, Malling, Chillington, and several more of like sort: while the little dale just below Beachy Head contains no fewer than ten village names of the English clan type. Beyond the downs, in the forest of the Weald, the English settled but sparingly; though even here we get a fair sprinkling of such names as Billinghurst, Itchingfield, and Fletching. Their terminations in field, hurst, ley, and den generally show that these outlying settlements were not regular colonies, hams or tuns, but mere clearings for swineherds and hunters in the great sheet of forest. Taken as a whole, however, Sussex is one of the most purely Teutonic counties in England: though many traces of Celtic blood still survive among the labouring classes, particularly in the Weald. It is usual to look upon the destruction of Anderida as typical of the fate which fell upon all the Britons of Teutonic England; but even in this, the most Saxon shire of Britain, the dolichocephalic skulls, the dark hair, and the brunette complexions of a few at least among the peasantry betoken the survival of some small remnant of the ancient race.

The consolidation of the Hastingas with the Chichester tribes is quite prehistoric. When first we hear of Sussex we hear of it as an independent and united kingdom. Separated as it was from the rest of Britain, it was the last of the English principalities to receive Christianity, nearly a hundred years after the conversion of Kent. And even when it was finally evangelised, the preachers came, not from the neighbouring Christian kingdoms of Kent or Wessex which hemmed it in on either side, but from over sea. The mark with which every English kingdom was accustomed to protect itself was, in the case of forest-girt and marsh-encircled Sussex, so effectual that the earliest missionaries came from Ireland, and established their monastery at Bosham, near Chichester. As usual, the king and queen were the first converts. Afterwards, Wilfred of York, wrecked upon the Bill of Selsea, completed the conversion of the people—or at least brought them into orthodox communion with Rome; and he placed the first Sussex cathedral at Selsea itself, now covered by the encroachment of the sea. After the Norman Conquest it was removed to Chichester, the capital town, in accordance with the Norman habit of combining the centres of ecclesiastical and political organisation. Sussex remained an independent principality till its conquest by Wessex; and even then it continued to have under-kings of its own, until its royal line became extinct. When the kingly House of Wessex raised itself to complete supremacy by its resistance to the Danes, it was still the custom for these smaller kingdoms to be bestowed as titular monarchies upon West Saxon princes, who governed them as vicegerents of the King at Winchester—just as the eldest son of our modern Sovereigns bears the title of Prince of Wales, and is actually Duke of Cornwall. So Sussex dropped gradually from the rank of a kingdom to that of a shire, and came to be amalgamated with the rest of England. Still, all through the Middle Ages the strip of coast was largely cut off from the inland districts and the capital by the barrier of the Weald; and it was not till the reign of Elizabeth that that dividing belt began to be largely cleared for the iron-smelting. Thus it is quite clear why Sussex is a separate county, and why its boundaries should be what they are. It may be accepted as the best typical instance of the English shire, as the modern representative of an old independent Teutonic commonwealth, still possessing a certain local independence and integrity of its own.