For the reasons which have determined the existence of Sussex as a county of England, and which have given it the exact boundaries that it now possesses, we must go back to the remote geological history of the secondary ages. Its limits and its very existence as a separate shire were predetermined for it by the shape and consistence of the mud or sand which gathered at the bottom of the great Wealden lake, or filled up the hollows of the old inland cretaceous sea. Paradoxical as it sounds to say so, the Celtic kingdom of the Regni, the South Saxon principality of ?lle the Bretwalda, the modern English county of Sussex, have all had their destinies moulded by the geological conformation of the rock upon which they repose. Where human annals see only the handicraft and interaction of human beings—Euskarian and Aryan, Celt and Roman, Englishman and Norman—a closer scrutiny of history may perhaps see the working of still deeper elements—chalk and clay, volcanic upheaval and glacial denudation, barren upland and forest-clad plain. The value and importance of these underlying facts in the comprehension of history has, I believe, been very generally overlooked; and I propose accordingly here to take the single county of Sussex in detail, in order to show that when the geological and geographical factors of the problem are given, all the rest follows as a matter of course. By such detailed treatment alone can one hope to establish the truth of the general principle that human history is at bottom a result of geographical conditions, acting upon the fundamentally identical constitution of man.

In a certain sense, it is quite clear that human life depends mainly upon soil and conformation, to an extent that nobody denies. You cannot have a dense population in Sahara; and you can hardly fail to have one in the fruitful valley of the Nile. The growth of towns in one district rather than another must be governed largely by the existence of rivers or harbours, of coal or metals, of agricultural lowlands or defensible heights. Glasgow could not spring up in inland Leicestershire, nor Manchester in coalless Norfolk. Insular England must naturally be the greatest shipping country in Europe; while no large foreign trade is possible in any Bohemia except Shakespeare\'s. So much everybody admits. But it seems to me that these underlying causes have coloured the entire local history of every district to an extent which few people adequately recognise, and that until such recognition becomes more general, our views of history must necessarily be very narrow. We must see not only that something depends upon geographical configuration, not even merely that a great deal depends upon it, but that everything depends upon it. We must unlearn our purely human history, and learn a history of interaction between nature and man instead.

From the great central boss of the chalk system in Salisbury Plain, two long cretaceous horns or projections run out to eastward towards the Channel and the German Sea. These two horns, separated by the deep valley of the Weald, are known as the North and South Downs respectively. The first great spur or ridge passes through the heart of Surrey, and then forms the backbone of Kent, expanding into a fan at its eastward extremity, where it topples over abruptly into the sea in the sheer bluffs which sweep round in a huge arc from the North Foreland in the Isle of Thanet, to Shakespeare\'s Cliff at Dover. The second or southernmost range, that of the South Downs, parts company from the main boss in Hampshire, and runs eastward in a narrower but bolder line, till the Channel cuts short its progress in the water-worn precipice of Beachy Head. Between these two ranges of Downs lies the low forest region of the Weald, and between the South Downs and the sea stretches a long but very narrow strip of lowland, beginning at Chichester, and ending where the chalk cliffs first meet the shore beside the new Aquarium and Chain Pier at Brighton. Thus the whole of Sussex consists of three well-marked parallel belts: the low coast-line on the south-west, the high chalk Downs in the centre, and the Weald district on the north and north-west. As these three belts determine the whole history and very existence of Sussex as an English shire, I shall make no apology for treating their origin here in some rapid detail.

The oldest geological formation with which we have to deal in Sussex (to any considerable extent) is the Wealden: so that our inquiry need not go any farther back in the history of the world than the later secondary ages. Before that time, and for long ?ons afterward, the portion of the earth\'s crust which now forms Sussex had probably never emerged from the ocean. Britain was then wholly represented by the primary regions of Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall, forming a small archipelago or group of rocky islands separated at some distance by a wide passage from the nucleus of the young European continent. But by the Wealden period, the English Channel and the Eastern half of England had been considerably elevated above the level of the sea. Great rivers and lakes existed in this new continental region, much like those which now exist in Sweden, Northern Russia, and Canada; and the deposits of sand or mud formed at their bottoms or in their estuaries compose the chief part of the Wealden formation in England. Without going fully into this question (somewhat complicated by frequent changes of level), it will suffice for our present purpose to say that the Wealden consists, in the main, of two great divisions, which form, so to speak, the floor, or lowest story, of the Sussex formations. The first or bottom division is chiefly composed of a rather soft and friable sandstone, which runs through the whole Forest Ridges, and crops out in the grey cliffs of Hastings and Fairlight. The second or upper division is chiefly composed of a thick greasy clay, which forms the soil in the greater part of the Weald, and glides unobtrusively under the sea in the flat shore on either side of Hastings, giving rise to the lowlands of Pevensey Bay and the Romney Marshes. Why the sandstone, which is really the bottom layer, should appear higher than the clay in these places, we shall see a little later.

After the deposition of the gritty or muddy Wealden beds in the lake and embouchure of the old continental river, there came a second period of considerable depression, during which the whole of south-eastern England was once more covered by a shallow sea. This sea ran, like an early northern Mediterranean, right across the face of Central Europe; and on its bottom was deposited the soft ooze of globigerina shells and siliceous sponge skeletons which has now hardened into chalk and flint. A great cretaceous sheet thus overlay the Wealden beds and the whole face of Sussex to a depth of at least 600 feet; and if it had not been afterwards worn off in places, as the nursery rhyme says of old Pillicock, it would be there still. I need hardly say that the chalk is yet en évidence along the whole range of South Downs, and forms the tall white cliffs between Brighton and Beachy Head.

Finally, during the Tertiary period, another layer of London clay and other soft deposits was spread over the top of the chalk, certainly on the strip between the South Downs and the sea, and probably over the whole district between the Channel and the Thames valley: though in this case, later denudation has proceeded so far that very few traces of the Tertiary formations are preserved anywhere except in the greater hollows.

Such being the original disposition of the strata which compose Sussex, we have next to ask, What are the causes which have produced its existing configuration? If the whole mass had merely been uplifted straight out of the sea, we ought now to find the whole country a flat and level table-land, covered over its entire surface with a uniform coat of Tertiary deposits. On digging or boring below these, we ought to come upon the chalk, and below the chalk again, with its cretaceous congeners the greensand or the gault, we ought to meet the Weald clay and the Hastings sand. Wherever a seaward cliff exhibited a section for our observation, we ought to find these same strata all exposed in regular order—the sandstone at the bottom, the clay above it, the broad belt of chalk halfway up, and the Tertiary muds and rubbles at the top. But in the county as we actually find it, we get a very different state of things. Here, the surface at sea-level is composed of London clay; there, a great mound of chalk rises into a swelling down; and yonder, once more, a steep escarpment leads us down into a broad lowland of the Weald. The causes which have led to this arrangement of surface and conformation must now be considered with necessary brevity.

The North and South Downs, with all the country between them, form part of a great fold or outward bulge of the strata above enumerated, having its centre about the middle line of the Forest Ridge. Imagine these strata bent or pushed upward by an internal upheaving force acting along that line, and you will get a rough picture of the original circumstances which have led to the existing arrangement of the county. You would then have, instead of a flat table-land, as supposed above, a great curved mountain slope, with its centre on top of the Forest Ridge. This gentle slope would rise from the sea between Chichester and a point south of Beachy, would swell slowly upward till it reached a height of two or three thousand feet at the Surrey border, and would fall again gradually towards the Thames valley at London. On the southern side of the Downs this is pretty much what we now get, the Tertiary strata being preserved in the district near Chichester; though farther east, around Newhaven and Beachy Head, the sea has encroached upon the chalk so as to cut out the great white cliffs which bound the view everywhere along the shore from Brighton to Eastbourne. In the central portion of the boss, however, almost all the highest elevated part has been denuded by ice or water action. Between the North and South Downs, where we ought to find the mountain ridge, we find instead the valley of the Weald. Here the chalk has been quite worn away, giving rise to the steep escarpment on the northern side of the South Downs, seen from the Devil\'s Dyke, so that at the foot of the sudden descent we get the Weald clay exposed; while in the very centre of the upheaved tract the clay itself has been cut through, and the Hastings sand appears upon the surface. Moreover, the sand, being upraised by the central force, stands higher than the clay on either side, which forms the trough of the Weald; and thus the forest ridge, which abuts upon the sea in the cliffs of Hastings Castle, seems to lie above the clay, under which, however, it really glides on either side. I need hardly add that this rough diagrammatic description is only meant as a general indication of the facts, and that it considerably simplifies the real geological changes probably involved in the sculpture of Sussex. Nevertheless, I believe it pretty accurately represents the main formative points in the ante-human history of the county.

So much by way of preface or introduction. These facts of structure form the data for the reconstruction of the Sussex annals during the human period. Upon them as framework all the subsequent development of the county hangs. And first let us observe how, before the advent of man upon the scene, the shire was already strictly demarcated by its natural boundaries. Along the coast, between Chichester Harbour and Brighton, stretched a long, narrow, level strip of clay and alluvium, suitable for the dwelling-place of an agricultural people. Back of this coastwise belt lay the bare rounded range of the South Downs—good grazing land for sheep, but naturally incapable of cultivation. Two rivers, however, flowed in deep valleys through the Downs, and their basins, with the outlying combes and glens, were also the predestined seats of agricultural communities. The one was the Ouse, passing through the fertile country around Lewes, and falling at last into the English Channel at Seaford, not as now at Newhaven; the other was the Cuckmere river, which has cut itself a deep glen in the chalk hills just beneath the high cliffs of Beachy Head. Beyond the Downs again, to the north, the country descended abruptly to the deep trough of the Weald, whose cold and sticky clays or porous sandstones are never of any use for purposes of tillage. Hence, as its very name tells us, the Weald has always been a wild and wood-clad region. The Romans knew it as the Silva Anderida, or forest of Pevensey; the early English as the Andredesweald. Both names are derived from a Celtic root signifying \'The Uninhabited.\' Even in our own day, a large part of this tract is covered by the woodlands of Tolgate Forest, St. Leonard\'s Forest, and Ashdown Forest; while the remainder is only very scantily laid down in pasture-land or hop-fields, with a considerable sprinkling of copses, woods, commons, and parks. From its very nature, indeed, the Weald can never be anything else, in its greater portion, than a wild, uncultivated, and wooded region.

Let us note, too, how the really habitable strip of Sussex, from the point of view of an early people, was quite naturally cut off from all other parts of England by obvious limits. This habitable strip consists, of course, of the coastwise belt from Brighton to the Hampshire border (which belt I shall henceforward take the liberty of designating as Sussex Proper), together with the seaward valleys and combes of the South Downs. To the west, the great tidal flats and swamps about Hayling Island cut off Sussex from Hampshire; and before drainage and reclamation had done their work, these marshy districts must have formed a most impassable frontier. From this point, the great woodland region of the Weald, thickly covered with prim?val forest, and tenanted by wolves, bears, wild boars, and red deer, swept round in a long curve from the swamps at Bosham and Havant to the corresponding swamps of the opposite end at Pevensey and Hurstmonceux. The belt of savage wooded country, thick with the lairs of wild beasts, which thus ringed round the greater part of the county, shut off the coastwise strip at once from all possibility of communication with the rest of England. So Sussex Proper and the combes of the Downs were naturally predestined to form a single Celtic kingdom, a single Saxon principality, and a single English shire.

It will be observed that this description leaves wholly out of consideration the strip of country about Hastings, Rye, and Winchelsea. It does so intentionally. That strip of country does not belong to Sussex in the same intimate and strictly necessary manner as the rest of the county. It probably once formed the seat of a small independent community by itself; and though there were good and obvious reasons why it should become finally united to Sussex rather than to Kent, it may be regarded as to some extent a debateable island between them. For an island it practically was in early times. At Pevensey Bay the Weald ran down into the sea by a series of swamps and bogs still artificially drained by dykes and sluices. On the other side, the Romney marshes formed a similar though wider stretch of tidal flats, reclaimed and drained at a far later period, partly through the agency of the long shingle bank thrown up round the low modern spit of Dungeness. Between them, the Hastings cliffs rose high above marsh and sea. In their rear, the Weald forest covered the ridge; so that the Hastings district (still a separate rape or division of the county) formed a sort of smaller Sussex, divided, like the larger one, from all the rest of England by a semicircular belt of marsh, forest, and marsh once more. These are the main elements out of which the history of the county is made up.

How far such conditions may have acted upon the very earliest human inhabitants of Sussex—the pal?olithic savages of the drift—before the last Glacial epoch, it is impossible to say, because we know that many of them did not then exist, and that the present configuration of the county is largely due to subsequent agencies. Britain was then united to the continent by a broad belt of land, filling up the bed of the English Channel, and it possessed a climate wholly different from that of the present day; while the position of the drift and the river gravels shows that the sculpture of the surface was then in many respects unlike the existing distribution of hill and valley. We must confine ourselves, therefore, to the later or recent period (subsequent to the last glaciation of Britain), during which man has employed implements of polished stone, of bronze, and of iron.

The Euskarian neolithic population of Britain—a dark white race, like the modern Basques—had settlements in Sussex, at least in the coast district between the Downs and the sea. Here they could obtain in abundance the flints for the manufacture of their polished stone hatchets; while on the alluvial lowlands of Selsea and Shoreham they could grow those cereals upon which they largely depended for their daily bread. Neolithic monuments, indeed, are common along the range of the South Downs, as they are also on the main mass of the chalk in Salisbury Plain; and at Cissbury Hill, near Worthing, we have remains of one of the largest neolithic camp refuges in Britain. The evidence of tumuli and weapons goes to show that the Euskarian people of Sussex occupied the coast belt and the combes of the Downs from the Chichester marshland to Pevensey, but that they did not spread at all into the Weald. In fact, it is most probable that at this early period Sussex was divided into several little tribes or chieftainships, each of which had its own clearing in the lowland cut laboriously out of the forest by the aid of its stone axes; while in the centre stood the compact village of wooden huts, surrounded by a stockade, and girt without by the small cultivated plots of the villagers. On the Downs above rose the camp or refuge of the tribe—an earthwork rudely constructed in accordance with the natural lines of the hills—to which the whole body of people, with their women, children, and cattle, retreated in case of hostile invasion from the villagers on either side. It is not likely that any foreigners from beyond the great forest belt of the Weald would ever come on the war-trail across that dangerous and trackless wilderness; and it is probable, therefore, that the camps or refuges were constructed as places of retreat for the tribes against their immediate neighbours, rather than against alien intruders from without. Hence we may reasonably conclude—as indeed is natural at such an early stage of civilisation—that the whole district was not yet consolidated under a single rule, but that each village still remained independent, and liable to be engaged in hostilities with all others. Even if extended chieftainships over several villages had already been set up, as is perhaps implied by the great tumuli of chiefs and the size of the camps in some parts of Britain, we must suppose them to have been confined for the most part to a single river valley. If so, there may have been petty Euskarian principalities, rude supremacies or chieftainships like those of South Africa, in the Chichester lowlands, in the dale of Arun, in the valleys of the Adur, the Ouse, and the Cuckmere River, and perhaps, too, in the insulated Hastings region, between the Pevensey levels and the Romney marsh. These principalities would then roughly coincide with the modern rapes of Chichester, Arundel, Bramber, Lewes, Pevensey, and Hastings. Each would possess its own group of villages, and tilled lowland, its own boundary of forest, and its own camp of refuge on the hill-tops. Cissbury almost undoubtedly formed such a camp for the fertile valley of the Adur and the coast strip from Worthing to Brighton. On its summit has been discovered an actual manufactory of stone implements from the copious material supplied by the flint veins in the chalk of which it is composed.

Such a society, left to itself in Sussex, could never have got much further than this. It could not discover or use metals, when it had no metal in its soil except the small quantity of iron to be found in the then inaccessible Weald. It had no copper and no tin, and therefore it could not manufacture bronze. But the geographical position of England generally, within sight of the European continent, made it certain that if ever anywhere else bronze should come to be used, the bronze-weaponed people must ultimately cross over and subjugate the stone-weaponed aborigines of the island. Moreover, bronze was certain to be first hit upon in those countries where tin and copper were most easily workable—that is to say, in Asia. From Asia, the secret of its manufacture spread to the outlying peninsula of Europe, where it was quickly adopted by the Aryan Celts, who had already invaded the outlying continent, armed only with weapons of stone. As soon as they had learnt the use of bronze, certain great changes and improvements followed naturally—amongst others, an immense advance in the art of boat-building. The Celts of the bronze age soon constructed vessels which enabled them to cross the narrow seas and invade Britain. Their superior weapons gave them at once an enormous advantage over the Euskarian natives, armed only with their polished flint hatchets, and before long they overran the whole island, save only the recesses of Wales and the north of Scotland. From that moment, the bronze age of Britain set in—say some 1,000 or 1,500 years before the Christian era.

The Celts, however, did not exterminate the whole Euskarian people; they were too few in number and too far advanced in civilisation for such a course. They knew it was better to make them slaves than to destroy them: for the Celts had just reached, but had not yet got beyond, the slave-making stage of culture. To this day, people of mixed Euskarian parentage, and marked by the long skull, dark complexion, and black eyes of the Euskarian type, form a large proportion of the English peasantry; and they are found even in Sussex, which subsequently suffered more than most other parts of Britain from the destructive deluge of Teutonic barbarism in the fifth century. But though the Celts did not exterminate the Euskarians, they completely Celticised them, just as the Teuton is now Teutonising the old population of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In South Wales and elsewhere, indeed, the aborigines retained their own language and institutions, as Silures and so forth; but in the conquered districts of southern and eastern Britain they learned the tongue of their masters, and came to be counted as Celtic serfs. Thus, at the time when Britain comes forth into the full historic glare of Roman civilisation, we find the country inhabited by a Celtic aristocracy of Aryan type—round-headed, fair-haired, and blue-eyed; together-with a plebs of Celticised Euskarian or half-caste serfs, retaining, as they still retain, the long skulls and dark complexions of their aboriginal ancestors. This was the ethnical composition of the Sussex population at the date of the first Roman invasions.

Under the bronze-weaponed Celts, a very different type of civilisation became possible. In the first place a more extended chieftainship resulted from the improved weapons and consequent military power; and all Britain (at least, towards the close of the Celtic domination) became amalgamated into considerable kingdoms, some of which seem to have spread over several modern shires. Sussex, however, enclosed by its barrier of forest, would naturally remain a single little principality of itself, held, at least in later times, by a tribe known to the Romans as Regni. Traces of Celtic occupation are mainly confined to the Downs and the seaward slope of Sussex Proper; in the broad expanse of the Weald, they are few and far between. The Celts occupied the fertile valleys and alluvial slopes, cut down the woods by the river sides and on the plains, and built their larger and more regular camps of refuge upon the Downs, for protection against the kindred Cantii beyond the Weald, or the more distantly-related Belg? across the Hayling tidal flats. Of these hill-forts, Hollingbury Castle, near Brighton, may be taken as a typical example. Bronze weapons and other implements of the bronze age are found in great numbers about Lewes in particular (where the isolated height, now crowned by the Norman Castle, must always have commanded the fertile river vale of the Ouse), as well as at Chichester, Bognor, and elsewhere. But the great forest, inhabited by savage beasts and still more terrible fiends, proved a barrier to their northward extension. Even if they had cleared the land, they could not have cultivated it with their existing methods; and so it is only in a few spots near the upper river valleys that we find any traces of outlying Celtic hamlets in the wilderness of the Weald. Some kind of trade, however, must have existed between the Regni and the other tribes of Britain, in order to supply them with the bronze, whose component elements Sussex does not possess. Woolsonbury, Westburton Hill, Clayton Hill, Wilmington, Hangleton Down, Plumpton Plain, and many other places along the coast have yielded large numbers of bronze implements; while the occurrence of the raw metal in lumps, together with the finished weapons, at Worthing and Beachy Head, as well the discovery of a mould for a socketed celt at Wilmington, shows that the actual foundry work was performed in Sussex itself. A beautiful torque from Hollingbury Castle attests the workmanship of the Sussex founders. No doubt the tin was imported from Cornwall, while the copper was probably brought over from the continent. Glass beads, doubtless of Southern (perhaps Egyptian) manufacture, have also been found in Sussex, with implements of the bronze age.

In the polished stone age, the county had been self-supporting, because of its possession of flint. In the bronze age it was dependent upon other places, through its non-possession of copper or tin. During the former period it may have exported weapons from Cissbury; during the latter, it must have imported the material of weapons from Cornwall and Gaul.

Before the Romans came, the Celts of Britain had learned the use of iron. Whether they ever worked the iron of the Weald, however, is uncertain. But as the ores lie near the surface, as wood (to be made into charcoal) for the smelting was abundant, and as these two facts caused the Weald iron to be extensively employed in later times, it is probable that small clearings would be made in the most accessible spots, and that rude ironworks would be established.

The same geographical causes which made Britain part of the Roman world naturally affected Sussex, as one of its component portions. Even under the Empire, however, the county remained singularly separate. The Romans built two strong fortresses at Anderida and Regnum, Pevensey and Chichester, to guard the two Gwents or lowland plains, where the shore shelves slowly to seaward; and they ran one of their great roads across the coastwise tract, from Dover to the Portus Magnus (now Porchester), near Portsmouth; but they left Sussex otherwise very much to its own devices. We know that the Regni were still permitted to keep their native chief, who probably exercised over his tribesmen somewhat the same subordinate authority which a Rájput raja now exercises under the British government. Here, again, we see the natural result of the isolation of Sussex. The Romans ruled directly in the open plains of the Yorkshire Ouse and the Thames, as we ourselves rule in the Bengal Delta, the Doáb, and the Punjáb; but they left a measure of independence to the native princes of south Wales, of Sussex, and of Cornwall, as we ourselves do to the native rulers in the deserts of Rájputana, the inaccessible mountains of Nipal, and the aboriginal hill districts of Central India.

When the Roman power began to decay, the outlying possessions were the first to be given up. The Romans had enslaved and demoralised the provincial population; and when they were gone, the great farms tilled by slave labour under the direction of Roman mortgagee-proprietors lay open to the attacks of fresh and warlike barbarians from beyond the sea. How early the fertile east coasts of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia may have fallen a prey to the Teutonic pirates we cannot say. The wretched legends, indeed, retailed to us by Gildas, B?da, and the English Chronicle, would have us believe that they were colonised at a later period; but as they lay directly in the path of the marauders from Sleswick, as they were certainly Teutonised very thoroughly, and as no real records survive, we may well take it for granted that the l............