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Chapter Three

The County

A Piece of Chalk

Underfoot, the turf is short, rabbit-bitten and studded with tiny flowers with names that read like fragments of an unassembled poem: eyebright, silverweed and bird’s-foot trefoil; wild thyme, yellow wort and scarlet pimpernel. To the right and left, nearer the woods, and standing much higher, are more wildflowers: hemp agrimony, self heal, woundwort, centaury, rosebay willow herb, wild parsnip, viper’s bugloss and thistles that smell like spilt honey. Among them flutter the butterflies: my wife, the expert, identifies comma and peacock, red admiral, large and small tortoiseshell.

We are deep in the Cretaceous, in a shallow valley or bottom between two of the Sussex Downs, and everything about me is a lesson in the making of a county. The rock underneath our feet is a soft, porous form of calcium carbonate called chalk, and it extends into the Earth’s crust for hundreds of metres. This chalk represents ancient life: each microscopic brick in this prodigious earthwork was once a tiny little planktonic alga called a cocco-sphere that flourished in the hot, sunlit seas that marked the Cretaceous period, which lasted for about eighty million years and ended sixty-five million years ago. Creatures similar to these still live in the tropical waters, well below the surface, but within the region that light can penetrate. They still use sunlight and the weaponry of photosynthesis to build tissue by absorbing carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater; they still bloom, replicate and die, and their tiny remains still fall slowly through the darkening waters, to settle on the deep seabed and become part of the abyssal ooze that cloaks the hard basalt of the ocean floor. The remains – bones seems the wrong word, because a cocco-sphere is a little assembly of tiny scales or plates, shaped into an orb – are called coccoliths. It isn’t hard to imagine a great, warm ocean under sunny skies; it isn’t hard to imagine the light flickering diffusely through the relatively still water far beneath the waves; it isn’t hard to imagine microscopic plants slowly forming, hijacking energy from this filtered sunlight to construct themselves, molecules at a time, from material dissolved in the waters around; it isn’t hard to imagine many of them being eaten by zooplankton or consumed by fish which would in their turn be devoured by larger predators. It isn’t hard to imagine that enough would survive to die naturally, and begin the long, slow fall into the darkness below.

It isn’t hard to imagine any of these things; it is however hard to imagine such things happening for eight, or eighteen, or eighty million years. People who tick off generations in twenty-five-year spans, who expect to die at around the time their grandchildren are ready to reproduce, who count national history in centuries, who measure the history of civilisation in millennia, simply cannot absorb the immensity of a time span measured in tens of millions of years.

Algal plankton are not visible to the naked eye. Their mortal remains are even smaller. What kind of dusting would invisible skeletons leave on the ocean bottom, and how fast would this dust assemble? Under the pressure of more and more invisible skeletons raining down, to create at first a protective layer, and then a blanket, and then another blanket, and then the submarine equivalent of an eiderdown, and then another eiderdown, and then a mattress, at what stage would the cumulative, smothering weight finally crush the bottom-most layers of this soft, yielding bed into rock? How long would it take to make what now represents a centimetre of chalk, a cylinder of which a teacher might once have used to inscribe history on a blackboard, or in exasperation might once have thrown at an inattentive pupil (something that teachers used to do)?

Suppose it took a thousand years to make one centimetre of this undisturbed, impacted submarine dust. In 100,000 years, there would be a metre of chalk. In a million years, there would be ten metres of chalk. The chalk of the Sussex Downs extends for five hundred metres, and nobody can possibly know how much of this chalk has already been eroded: washed or blown or scraped away by rain, wind and ice, or scoured away by advancing and receding seas. The white cliffs of Dover in Kent and the Seven Sisters of Sussex are a work in progress: in the progress of demolition rather than construction, as the Channel tides and tempestuous waves driven by seasonal gales tear away at their basements, and bring down the fabric above. But as long as they endure, the cliffs stand as testament to warm seas, sunny skies and a world occupied by strange creatures.

The Cretaceous period was one in which there was almost no ice or snow, except on the highest mountains. Forests grew in Antarctica, and on the north slopes of Alaska. Dinosaurs grazed, hunted, reproduced and died far within the Antarctic Circle. Sea levels were far higher than today: sometimes hundreds of metres higher. The chalk exposed in the iconic white cliffs of southeastern England is only a small fraction of all the chalk there is to be found: there is chalk beneath, and occasionally exposed at the surface of, Yorkshire, and East Anglia, and France, and Germany, and much further, too. Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, in a famous essay on ‘A Piece of Chalk’, pointed out that

it runs through Denmark and Central Europe, and extends southward to North Africa; while eastward, it appears in the Crimea and in Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the Sea of Aral, in Central Asia. If all the points at which true chalk occurs were circumscribed, they would lie within an irregular oval about three thousand miles in long diameter – the area of which would be as great as that of Europe, and would many times exceed that of the largest existing inland sea – the Mediterranean.

But this vast bedrock-in-the-making, this shelf of calcareous substrate, cannot have been submerged for the whole of the Cretaceous. Below the chalk lies greensand from the same geological period, a muddy sediment that speaks of entirely different conditions: of a huge, wandering delta landscape, of marsh, meanders, oxbow lakes and seasonally flooding rivers that would dry up and exist only as trickles, built up by silt from the mountains further inland, and then occasionally swept away again as the sea invaded, leaving its signature in the form of raised beaches.

These beds, too, extend hundreds of metres downwards: their rock is now the Weald of Kent and Sussex, and they represent a long overture, a prelude, a period of marsh and mudflat, water meadow and tidal estuary, beach, dune and delta. Through this well-watered, fertile silt stalked iguanodon and baryonyx, and above them flew pterosaurs. Elsewhere in the world, Tyrannosaurus rex was already on the prowl; ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs hunted in the shallow seas. So the Cretaceous period is marked by episodes of high and low water, of violence and movement. The modern world had begun to take shape: the Atlantic had begun to open, and Africa had begun to close in upon what would become the Mediterranean, to start pushing up the Alps. The extended ripples of that impact would gently uplift the chalk and shape the contours that would one day become the Downs, and the sediments that would form the Weald. Western Europe might be partly or entirely submerged, but at intervals fragments of Britain and Brittany must have been visible high above the waves: Wales was a rocky island, and so was something that would one day become Cornwall. The Pennines stood proud, and there was once an East Anglian massif – yes, marvel at the mountains of Norfolk, now at sea level and sooner or later to be submerged – that towered above the submerged Wessex basin. This exposed rock was sheathed not just with the implacable green of fern and cycad and moss: it sported splashes of bright colour. Vegetation had begun to change, and with it the fauna of fields and forests.

The ancestors of modern butterflies and moths, the first ants, the first aphids, grasshoppers and gall wasps appeared during the Cretaceous, and so did the first flowering plants. The grasses will not emerge for aeons, but petals, pistils and pollen have begun to evolve and flowering plants to speciate in precise step with a new generation of pollinators, predators and scavengers. Chalk flowers such as eyebright and scarlet pimpernel have their roots in the Cretaceous, metaphorically as well as literally, and the comma butterfly is a kind of lepidopteran punctuation mark in a long story that begins with the chalk.

But this accidental epic contains another narrative, one from which the history of human science and technology grows. At intervals in the chalk are puzzling inclusions called flints. Chalk is soft, flint is hard; a lump of chalk can be of any size or shape, but flints are knobbly, uneven things usually measured in centimetres or tens of centimetres. The exterior of flint is white: it takes its colouring from the carbonate of lime in which it is found. The interior however is dark: it is a concretion of silicon dioxide, also known as quartz, and also known as silica. There is no satisfactory explanation for the existence of hard nodules of flint in soft chalk, but the long-standing conjecture is that these too begin with submarine biology: they could have been formed from the siliceous remains of Cretaceous sponges that once grew in clumps on the seafloor. Flints are exposed with every ploughing, and they became the raw material for the walls, barns and homesteads of old settlements in the Sussex Downs.

Flints also provided western Europe’s first systematically exploited cutting-edge technology, its first tool of mass production, the Neolithic equivalent of the Swiss army knife. Bang a flint with something very hard, and you flake a fragment from it. Keep on doing that, and you can turn a nodule of flint into an axe, an adze, an awl, a chisel, a knife, an arrowhead, a spear point, a sickle, a razor, an item of barter or even a tool for mining yet more flints. Five or six thousand years ago, late-Stone-Age humans systematically dug a series of shafts and galleries in the chalk near Spiennes in Belgium, and excavated on an industrial scale huge quantities of flints that could be worked and then traded for goods from other locations. Simply to work the mines, get the product to the surface and then exploit its potential value, these Neolithic entrepreneurs had to be aware of the market pressures of supply and demand, the principles of sustained cooperative endeavour, the basic demands of health and safety management, the logic of shared income and the role of specialist craftsmanship in the wider commonwealth; of the notion of apprenticeship and education; and in addition the proper design and deployment of pit props, the planned removal of spoil and other mining requirements. All modern technology and business theory starts from the silica chip. One property of flint is that if struck with metal it will fire sparks: flint was the first portable, all-purpose firelighter, and thousands of years later would become the basis of the flintlock musket.

Silica in the form of sand became the basis for glass; it also became a bulk component of ceramic and of concrete. Out of glass, craftsmen ground the first lenses and assembled the first telescopes and microscopes, prepared the first prisms and made the first artificial rainbows from a beam of white light. The sciences of astronomy and navigation, of microbiology and the germ theory of disease, of spectroscopy and atomic theory, all begin with the exploitation of silicon dioxide. So a silica chip, first flaked from flint by an unknown hominid more than a million years ago, was the beginning of all science, and all technology; it was the beginning of the exploration of space and time, and of the tissue of life itself.

Flint wasn’t the only agent of Palaeolithic cutting-edge technology: the earliest tool users exploited obsidian, and basalt, and bone and antler and shell, and even greenstone. But flint turned out to be the most versatile: so easily worked that tools could be made, used and abandoned; so easily found on or near the surface that hunting parties would make detours to known outcrops of chalk and flint to renew their weaponry again and again; so reliable that the tribesmen who camped in Belgium more than five thousand years ago considered it worth their while to establish a pithead, and a factory site, and to exploit the same resource for generations. And all this potential power was deposited and fashioned by the prevailing conditions deep in the oceans of the Cretaceous period, eighty or a hundred million years ago.

It seems presumptuous to claim that human ingenuity, technology and cooperation were driven by the discovery of flint; but it might be that without a reliable supply of superior tool-making material early on in the story, without, so to speak, that extra edge, Homo sapiens might not have survived. The first anatomically modern humans are, genetically, so closely related that geneticists suspect that there might have been a population crash 70,000 years ago, leaving only small band of survivors to engender all the billions who now command the planet’s resources. In a touch-and-go world, who can be sure what tipped the balance towards survival? Our species might have disappeared in the way that Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis all did, the last of them around 30,000 years ago. So just as chalk and flint are part of the making of Sussex, chalk and the flint that it preserves are part of the making of human history.

This history begins, in Sussex, about 4000 BC. There were human settlers in the ancient wildwood long before that, but – I learn from Oliver Rackham’s scholarly work The History of the Countryside – around 4000 BC new people arrived, bringing with them ‘those crops, animals and weeds which constitute agriculture. They immediately set about converting Britain to an imitation of the dry, open steppes of the Near East, in which agriculture had begun.’ Perhaps the innovators were invaders, perhaps some of the existing population simply imported new strategies. The debate continues. But the wildwood they cleared was not primeval – before the ice retreated around 11,000 BC, northern Britain would have been a very large icicle, and southern England a stretch of tundra – but across what would become Sussex and other south-coast counties must have certainly been a wonderful mix of lime, oak and elm, left more or less alone to grow to enormous stature. And the people who cleared the land may never have seen or known about the Near East: it is enough that their ideas, their technology, their management of the countryside began there. By the Iron Age, dated from the sixth century BC, much of the wildwood had gone, and there were secondary woods full of coppiced hazel and other timber grown for special uses.

The Romans occupied Sussex, but left only one famous road between London and Chichester, famous in its Saxon name of Stane Street. It is not, however, Britain’s only Stane Street: there is another one that runs between St Albans and Colchester. They built a fort at Pevensey, and called it Anderitum, and at some time in the fourth century established a Roman commander called the comes litoris Saxonici, the wonderfully-named Count of the Saxon Shore, which alone suggests that Roman Britain was already under repeated assault. But this commander defended an area far larger than modern Sussex, and the name Sussex itself dates from the Kingdom of Sussex, or South Saxons, that began to form after the sacking of Anderitum or Anderida in ad 491, and Sussex anyway became absorbed into Wessex, and was then attacked and held for a while by the Danes, and Normans, also from across the Channel, had already set up in business in east Sussex many years before the formal invasion by Duke William in 1066.

Under the Normans, the management of Sussex, uniquely, was divided into rapes: initially Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey and Hastings, each with a castle, a lord and a waterway. Chichester was added later. The use of an Old English word for a Norman administrative arrangement has provoked the historians and encyclopaedia compilers into wondering if these divisions had already existed when William came. But the act of division, or the formal exploitation of already-existing divisions, also suggested a sensible precaution on the part of William. If he could invade the Sussex coast and seize a kingdom, then so could somebody else, which is perhaps why his half-brother, and a son-in-law, and other reliable men, were awarded military command and control of the fateful shore.

There are no meaningful maps from the period, but the Sussex described in laconic detail in the Domesday Book of 1086 (Ditchling: ‘King Edward held it. It never paid tax. Before 1066 it answered for 46 hides; when acquired only 42 hides; the others were in the Count of Mortain’s Rape, and 6 woods which belonged to the head of the manor …’) seems to have been in area and boundary much as it is now. Alciston is described (‘The Abbot of St Martins holds Alsistone from the King. Young Alnoth held it from King Edward.’) Rye, which belonged to the Abbot of Fécamp in Normandy even under the reign of Edward the Confessor, had ‘5 churches which pay 64 shillings; 100 salt houses at £8 15s, meadow 7 acres; woodlands, two pigs from pasturage’. The towns, villages and hamlets along the footpaths and bridleways of Sussex that we know well all get a mention: Alfriston and Bexhill, Exceat and East Dean; Bodiam, Jevington and Herstmonceux; Netherfield and Wilmington and Wannock, and Rodmell where Virginia Woolf drowned herself (‘Ramelle/Redmelle: William de Warenne, formerly Earl Harold, 11 salt houses, 4000 herrings’), have all existed for at least a thousand years (because the Domesday Book records ownership, entitlement and yield from before the Conquest as well as at the date of compilation), and probably a great deal longer.

There should be nothing surprising in the discovery that the settled landscape has changed so little in the last thousand years – fifteen or twenty lifespans, fifteen or twenty episodes of family life in which three generations could meet and feast in the same house – but somehow it is surprising. We tend through our education or our experience or our preferred reading to pursue intimacy with one period of history rather than another, and I cannot successfully imagine in any detail the England of the Conquest or the medieval centuries. I know a bit more about the England of Henry VIII and Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I, but it has always seemed an alien place to me: another country, where poets brawled and courtiers plotted and kings warred and landowners went to sea and explored new worlds and then came back and were put to death; where the devout were tortured and then incinerated for believing in the same God while following a different ritual of celebration; where Sir Richard Grenville could take on a whole armada, squander the lives of his seamen, and be hailed as a hero for it, rather than condemned as a pugnacious madman.

So the landscape of human ambition was different. The physical countryside beyond the cities seems to have remained throughout the centuries remarkably the same: the houses have changed, been rebuilt, extended and improved, again and again, but the terrain on which those houses stand seems barely to have altered. I stress the word seems. In 1586, William Camden visited Sussex, raced through its Roman past, briefly rehearsed its South Saxon origins, and then began to describe the county that I think I can see about me every time I go for a walk:

… it hath few harbours by reason that the sea is dangerous for shelves, and therefore rough and troublous, the shore also it selfe full of rocks, and the South-west wind doth tyrannize thereon, casting up beach infinitely. The sea coast of this countrie hath greene hils on it mounting to a greater height, called the Downes, which, because they stand upon a fat chalke or kind of marle, yeeldeth corne aboundantly. The middle tract, garnished with medowes, pastures, corne-fields, and growes [groves] maketh a very lovely shew …

In fact, Camden confirms that Sussex has certainly changed: the ‘rough and troublous’ seas that he records have torn away at the downland cliffs, and drastically rearranged the levels of Romney and Pevensey, have left the port and harbour of Rye and the castle of Bodiam stranded miles from the water’s edge, and have swept settlements away altogether. Camden describes Sussex:

Full of iron mines it is in sundry places, where for the making and fining whereof there bee furnaces on every side, and a huge deale of wood is yearely spent, to which purpose divers brookes in many places are brought to runne in one chanell, and sundry medowes turned into poles and waters, that they might bee of power sufficient to drive hammer milles, which beating upon the iron resound all over the places adjoyning.

Daniel Defoe, when he returned 150 years later, found Hastings barely worth a mention, and he observed that Rye

would flourish again, if her harbour, which was once able to receive the royal navy, cou’d be restor’d; but as it is, the bar is so loaded with sand cast up by the sea, that ships of 200 tun chuse to ride it out under Dengey or Beachy, tho’ with the greatest danger, rather than to run the hazard of going into Rye for shelter.

Dengey and Beachy must be Dungeness Point and Beachy Head. Defoe too was interested in the heavy industry of Sussex: ‘I had the curiosity to see the great foundaries, or iron-works, which are in this county, and where they are carry’d on at such a prodigious expence of wood, that even in a country almost all overrun with timber, they begin to complain of the consuming it for those furnaces, and leaving the next age to want timber for building their navies.’

The iron mines, furnaces and forges have gone. So in fact this sense of permanence, this feeling of enduring history, is a tease: landscapes alter. Humans make their mark and then in a generation or two the marks are erased: the evidence of what has once been may be visible enough to archaeologists, ecologists and topographers, to trained eyes, but to most of us the countryside we see is timeless: because it is there, and because it looks just so – a little pathway through woodland, a small clearing among the beech and Scots pine that is ablaze with rampion and bladder campion and stitchwort and rosebay willow herb – we find it easy to believe it has always looked so. A second inspection reveals that the woodland is in fact an old hedge that has been neglected for long enough that its hawthorn, elm and beech constituents have grown to full height, and its canopy has closed over the path. The beech and Scots pine trunks around the woodland clearing at closer examination are seen to stand in rows; the pines were planted, and many of them replaced after the first thinning with beech seedlings; the foresters have been here, and left a little place in the sun for the wildflowers, but already new saplings are pushing their way above the shrubs. The countryside tends to be seen as humans wish it to be. Anthropocentrics all, we see the landscape from our point of view, and even the entity we call the beauty of the wilderness is simply a happy arrangement of high ground and valley, glacier and river, forest and sky, that fits the unconscious frame of reference that we have for beauty: nature builds the structures, but we provide the composition.

Human appreciation changes too. Huxley, when contemplating the geology of Hampshire, Sussex and Kent, marvelled at the grandeur of the white cliffs of the Channel coast but patronisingly remarked that ‘the undulating downs and rounded coombs, covered with sweet-grassed turf, of our inland chalk country, have a peacefully domestic and mutton-suggesting prettiness, but can hardly be called either grand or beautiful’. The inland downs between Brighton and Eastbourne now seem to me to be one of the grandeurs of the world, precisely because their rounded, comely perfection – Kipling called them the ‘blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs’ – has been shaped by sheep. The Romney Breeders Association claims that the Romney sheep, the handsome, fleecy heavyweight of the Romney marshes, was the foundation of the great wool and mutton industry of New Zealand, but the other breed of sheep that we knew in New Zealand was the somewhat smaller, and perhaps more prettily mutton-suggesting Southdown, the basis (I am reminded by the Southdown Sheep Society) for Canterbury lamb, that is, lamb from the Canterbury plains of the South Island of New Zealand. This too takes its name from its place of origin, its first forwarding address, and this too is an old breed, one that would graze and manure downland pastures and enrich them enough for a wheat crop the following year.