by Grant Allen
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 Belgæ 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, Bæda, 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 long-boats of the English, sailing down with the prevalent north-east winds from the wicks of Denmark, came first to shore on these fertile coasts. After they had been conquered and colonised, the Saxon and Jutish freebooters began to look for settlements, on their part, farther south. One horde, led, as the legend veraciously assures us, by Hengest and Horsa, landed in Thanet; another, composed entirely of Saxons, and under the command of a certain dubious Ælle, came to shore on the spit of Selsea. It was from this last body that the county took its newer name of Suth-Seaxe, Suth Sexe, or Sussex. Let us first frankly narrate the legend, and then see how far it may fairly be rationalised.
In 477, says the English Chronicle — written down, it must be remembered, from traditional sources, four centuries later, at the court of Alfred the West Saxon — in 477, Ælle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing, and Cissa, came to Britain in three ships, and landed at the stow that is cleped Cymenes-ora. There that ilk day they slew many Welshmen, and the rest they drave into the wood hight Andredes-leah. In 485, Ælle, fighting the Welsh near Mearcredes Burn, slew many, and the rest he put to flight. In 491, Ælle, with his son Cissa, beset Andredes-ceaster, and slew all that therein were, nor was there after one Welshman left. Such is the whole story, as told in the bald and simple entries of the West Saxon annalist, A more dubious tradition further states that Ælle was also Bretwalda, or overlord, of all the Teutonic tribes in Britain.
And now let
us see what we can make of this wholly unhistorical and legendary tale. Whether there ever was a South Saxon king named Ælle we cannot say; but that the earliest English pirate fleet on this coast should have landed near Selsea is likely enough. The marauders would not land near the Romney marshes or the Pevensey flats, where the great fortresses of Lymne and Anderida would block their passage; and they could not beach their keels easily anywhere along the cliff-girt coast between Beachy Head and Brighton; so they would naturally sail along past the marshland and the chalk cliffs till they reached the open champaign shore near Chichester. Cymenes-ora, where they are said to have landed, is now Keynor on the Bill of Selsea; and Selsea itself, as its name (correctly Selsey) clearly shows us, was then an island in the tidal flats. This was just the sort of place which the English pirates loved, for all tradition represents their first settlements as effected on isolated spots like Thanet, Hurst Castle, Holderness, and Bamborough. Thence they would march upon Regnum, the square Roman town at the harbour head, and reduce it by storm, garrisoned as it doubtless was by a handful of semi-Romanised Welshmen or Britons. The town took the English name of Cissanceaster, or Chichester. Moreover, all around the Chichester district, we still find a group of English clan villages, with the characteristic patronymic termination ing. Such are East and West Wittering, Donnington, Funtington, Didling, and others. It is vraisemblable enough that the little strip of very low coast between Hayling Island and the Arun may have been the first original South Saxon colony. Nor is it by any means impossible that the names of Keynor and Chichester Cymenes-ora and Cissanceaster — may still enshrine the memory of two among the old South Saxon freebooters.
The tradition of a battle at Mearcredes Burn, when the Welsh were again defeated, may refer to an advance by which, a few years later, the South Saxon pirates pushed eastward along the coast, and occupied the strip of shore as far as Brighton, together with the fertile valley of the Lewes Ouse. In the first-named district we find a large group of English Clan villages, including Patching, Poling, Angmering, Goring, Worthing, Tarring, Washington, Lullington, Blatchingden, Ovingdean, Rottingdean, and many others. Amongst them is one which has clearly given rise to the name of Ælle’s third son, and that is Lancing. Unfortunately for the legend, we must decide that this was really the settlement of an English clan of Lancingas, as Washington was the tun or enclosure of the Weasingas, and Beddingham was the ham or home of the Beddingas. Around Lewes, in like manner, we find Tarring, Malling, Piddinghoe, Bletchington, and others; while in the valley just to the east we have ten or eleven such names as Lullington, Wilmington, Folkington, and Littlington. These districts, I imagine, represent the second advance of the English conquerors.
Finally, fourteen years after the first landing, the South Saxons crossed the Downs and attacked Anderida. The Roman walls of the great fortress were thick and strong, as their remains, built over by the Norman Castle, still show; but they were defended by half-trained Welsh, who could not withstand the English onset. With the fall of Anderida, the native power was broken for ever, ‘nor was there after one Welshman left.’ The English tribe of the Hastingas settled at Hastings; and the South Saxons were now supreme from marsh to marsh.
But did they really exterminate the native Celt-Euskarian population? I venture to say, no. Some no doubt, especially the men, they slew; but the women and children, as even Mr. Freeman admits, were probably spared in large numbers. Even of the men, many doubtless became slaves to the Saxon lords; while others maintained themselves in isolated bands in the Weald. To this day the Euskarian type of humanity is not uncommon among the Sussex peasantry, and all the rivers still bear the Celtic names of Arun, Adur, Ouse, and Calder. That there was ‘no Welshmen left’ is only another way of saying that the armed Welsh resistance ceased. The Romanised Britons became English churls and serfs — nay, the very name for a serf in ordinary conversation was Weala or Welshman. The population received a new element — the English Saxons — but it was not completely changed. The Weorthingas and Goringas simply became masters of the lands formerly held by Roman owners; and the cabins of their British serfs still clustered around the wooden hall of the English lords.
Nevertheless, Sussex is one of the most thoroughly Teutonised counties in England. The proportion of Saxon blood is very marked: light hair and blue eyes, together with the broad and short English skull, are common even among the peasantry. The number of English Clan names noticed by Mr. Kemble in the towns and villages of Sussex is 68 as against 60 in almost equally Teutonic Kent, 48 in Essex, 21 in largely Celtic Dorset, 6 in Cumberland, 2 in Cornwall, and none in Monmouth. The size and number of the hundreds into which the county is divided tells us much the same tale. Each hundred was originally a group of one hundred free English families, settled on the soil, and holding in check the native subject population of Anglicised Celt-Euskarian churls. Now, in Sussex we get 61 hundreds, and in Kent 61, as against 13 in Surrey beyond the Weald (where the clan names also sink to 18), and 8 in Hertfordshire. Or, to put it another way, which I borrow from Mr. Isaac Taylor, in Sussex there is one hundred to every 23 square miles; in Kent to every 24; in Dorset to every 30; in Surrey to every 58; in Herts to every 79; in Gloucester to every 97; in Derby to every 162; in Warwick to every 179; and in Lancashire to every 302. In other words, while in Kent, Sussex, and the east the free English inhabitants clustered thickly on the soil, with a relatively small servile population, in Mercia and the west the English population was much more sparsely scattered, with a relatively great servile population. So, as late as the time of Domesday, in Kent and Sussex the slaves mentioned in the great survey (only a small part, probably, of the total) numbered only 10 per cent. of the population, while in Devon and Cornwall they numbered 20 per cent., and in Gloucestershire 33 per cent.
These results are all inevitable. It is obvious that the first attacks must necessarily be made upon the east and south coasts, and that the inland districts and the west must only slowly be conquered afterward. Especially was it easy to found Teutonic kingdoms in the four isolated regions of Lincolnshire, East Anglia, Kent, and Sussex, each of which was cut off from the rest of England in early times by impassable fens, marshes, forests, or rivers. It was easy here to kill off the Welsh fighting population, to drive the remnants into the Fen Country or the Weald, to enslave the captives, the women, and the children, and to secure the Teutonic colony by a mark or border of woodland, swamp, or hill. On the other hand, Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia, with a vague and ill-defined internal border, had harder work to fight their way in against a united Welsh resistance; and it was only very slowly that they pushed across the central watershed, to dismember the unconquered remnant of the Britons at last into the three isolated bodies of Damnonia (Cornwall and Devon), Wales Proper, and Strathclyde. This is probably why the earliest settlements were made in these isolated coast regions, and why the inward progress of the other colonies was so relatively slow.
The South Saxons, then, at first occupied the three fertile bits of the county — the coast belt of Sussex Proper, the Valley of the Ouse, and the isolated Hastings district — because these were the best adapted for their strictly agricultural life. In spite of the legend of Ælle, I do not suppose that they were all united from the first under a single principality. It seems far more probable that each little clan settlement was at first wholly independent; that afterwards three little chieftainships grew up in the three fertile strips — typified, perhaps, by the story of Ælle’s three sons — and that the whole finally coalesced into a single kingdom of the South Saxons, which is the state in which we find the county in Bæda’s time. As ever, its boundaries were marked out for it by nature, for the Weald remained as yet an almost unbroken forest; and the names of Selsea, Pevensey, Winchelsea, Romney, and many others, show by their common insular termination (found in all isles round the British coast, as in Sheppey, Walney, Bardsea, Anglesea, Fursey, Wallasey, and so forth) that the marshland was still wholly undrained, and that a few islands alone stood here
and there as masses of dry land out of their desolate and watery expanse. The Hastings district, too, fell more naturally to Sussex than to Kent, because the marshes dividing it from the former were far less formidable than those which severed it from the latter. Most probably the South Saxons intentionally aided nature in cutting off their territory from all other parts of Britain; for every English kingdom loved to surround itself with a distinct mark or border of waste, as a defence against invasion from outside. The Romans had brought Sussex within the great network of their road system; but the South Saxons no doubt took special pains to cut off those parts of the roads which led across their own frontier. At any rate, it is quite clear that Sussex did not largely participate in the general life of the new England, and that intercourse with the rest of the world was extremely limited.
The South Saxon kings probably lived for the most part at Chichester, though no doubt they had hams, after the royal Teutonic fashion generally, in many other parts of their territory; and they moved about from one to the other, with their suite of thegns, eating up in each what food was provided by their serfs for their use, and then moving on to the next. The isolation of Sussex is strikingly shown by its long adherence to the primitive paganism. Missionaries from Rome, under the guidance of Augustine, converted Kent as early as 597. For Kent was the nearest kingdom to the continent; it contained the chief port of entry for continental travellers, Richborough — the Dover of those days — and its king, accustomed to continental connections, had married a Christian Frankish princess from Paris. Hence Kent was naturally the first Teutonic principality to receive the faith. Next came Northumbria, Lindsey, East Anglia, Wessex, and even inland Mercia. But Sussex still held out for Thor and Woden as late as 679, three-quarters of a century after the conversion of Kent, and twenty years after Mercia itself had given way to the new faith. Even when Sussex was finally converted, the manner in which the change took place was characteristic. It was not by missionaries from beyond the Weald in Kent or Surrey, nor from beyond the marsh in Wessex. An Irish monk, Bæda tells us, coming ashore on the open coast near Chichester, established a small monastery at Bosham — even then, no doubt, a royal ham, as we know it was under Harold— ‘a place,’ says the old historian significantly, ‘girt round by sea and forest.’ (It lies just on the mark between Wessex and the South Saxons.) Æthelwealh, the king — a curious name, for it means ‘noble Welshman’ (perhaps he was of mixed blood) — had already been baptized in Mercia, and his wife was the daughter of a Christian ealdorman of the Worcester-men; but the rest of the principality was heathen. The Irish monk effected nothing; but shortly after Wilfrith, the fiery Bishop of York, on one of his usual flying visits to Rome, got shipwrecked off Selsea. With his accustomed vigour, he went ashore, and began a crusade in the heathen land. He was able at once to baptize the ‘leaders and soldiers’ — that is to say, the free military English population; while his attendant priests — Eappa, Padda, Burghelm, and Oiddi (it is pleasant to preserve these little personal touches) — proceeded to baptize the ‘plebs’ — that is to say, the servile Anglicised Celt-Euskarian substratum — up and down the country villages.
